Vibe Management

A new phenomenon called 'Vibe Management' is emerging where middle managers use AI like Claude to generate strategy documents without genuine thought, creating a digital echo chamber of hallucinated strategies. This poses a greater risk than 'Vibe Coding' because the feedback loop for flawed strategies spans quarters and can sink companies, while AI-generated code bugs are caught in days.

Vibe Management Lots of people are worried about Vibe Coding, and rightly so, but the thing that worries me far more is Vibe Management. Vibe Management goes like this: Someone in middle management is told to come up with a strategy document for the next quarter. That sounds like an awful lot of work, so they start feeding documents into Claude. They tell themselves they’re getting AI to “do the first pass”, but the reality is Claude’s first pass comes out looking pretty good, and thinking of something better would be hard work, so they copy & paste the output into Google Docs. They change the odd sentence here and there, sure. Tell themselves they’re polishing the result. But pretty soon they call it a day. The strategy document has been created, the box has been ticked. Has the strategy had any thought put into it? Don’t ask difficult questions A document was asked for, a document has been written, and it’s filled with strategy words like ‘objective’ and ‘leverage’. What more do you want? Document complete, they send it to their boss, who’s receiving similar documents from 5-50 other direct reports. Reviewing all those sounds like an awful lot of work, so they too shove it into Claude - thank God for that 1M-token context window - and Claude synthesises all those hallucinated strategies into an uber-hallucination they can pass up the chain. Claude will also write some comments on each source-document, feedback which will also be read by Claude. The digital echo chamber reaches perfection. We now have a whole middle-management layer of strategies that have never had time, thought or effort put into them. At no point have they observed reality. At no point have they sought insight. But you can be sure of two things - there will be lots & lots of Google Docs to back the ‘strategy’ up, and the people on the front line will be expected to execute this ‘strategy’ no matter how detached from reality it may be. We are in an age where making something that seems fine has never been easier. You want a website that seems to work? I can turn it around in an hour. You want a Q3 strategy that seems smart? I can crank that out while I get coffee. But the reason the website worries me less is, if it doesn’t work you’ll probably find out pretty soon. The feedback loop for Vibe Coding bugs is usually measured in days, and usually not that expensive. But the feedback loop for Vibe Management is measured in quarters, and three or four quarters spent pursuing the wrong strategy can sink a company. We’re going to see companies spend a year, and a department’s worth of salaries, trying to execute on a strategy that never had an ounce of thought put into it. And it’s going to do damage to vastly more people than the managers who were looking for a shortcut. In the end, Vibe Coding and Vibe Management are symptoms of the same problem - letting AI do all your thinking for you. But for the most part, Vibe Management has a vastly larger org chart to inflict its damage on.