Glossary · ESL writing & AI detection
Vibe writing
Vibe writing is the writing analog of vibe coding: you supply the intent and the meaning, an AI shapes the prose, and your job shifts to steering, judging, and verifying. Done deliberately it is a legitimate drafting workflow; done lazily it produces voiceless AI-slop that no one — including you — actually wrote.
The term riffs on vibe coding, coined by Andrej Karpathy in 2025 for programming by prompt: describe what you want, accept what the model produces, iterate on vibes rather than syntax. Vibe writing transfers the loop to prose. You bring the argument, the facts, and the taste; the model drafts; you react — "warmer," "shorter," "less corporate" — until the text matches the intent you could feel but not yet phrase.
Used well, it is a real workflow, and for non-native English writers a particularly tempting one: you know exactly what you mean, the model knows English idiom, and the division of labor looks clean. The blank page disappears. Momentum is cheap.
The risks are just as real. Voice loss first: every draft converges toward the model's default register, and after enough accepted suggestions the text sounds like everyone else's AI-shaped prose. Verification debt second: fluent output reads as finished, so invented details slip through. And the more of the shaping you delegate, the more the result inherits the statistical signature that detectors and readers flag as machine-written — with everything that means for flagxiety. The line that separates vibe writing from ghostwriting is who owns the meaning: steer and verify every claim and the text is yours; delegate the thinking and it is not (see cognitive debt).
For a longer treatment — where the term came from, what it does to voice, and how to keep the useful part — see What is vibe writing?.
Diglot is a bilingual writing editor built for the writers these terms describe — start for free, no credit card required.
