Let’s talk about “vibe writing”

A writer describes using AI for minor editing tasks before experimenting with a large language model to provide feedback on a rough technical document draft, marking a shift toward more substantive AI-assisted writing.

When it comes to writing, I only used AI for smaller requests for a long time: fixing a typo, or smoothing over a clumsy sentence – the sort of thing a spellchecker does. I always found that handy, especially in English, which isn’t my mother tongue, but it never struck me as anything more than that. On a whim, one day I pasted a rough draft of a technical document into the LLM – mostly bullet points and a few half-finished sentences – and asked it for feedback.