I'm done with the future talk. Judgment matters now.
Speed is cheap now. So why aren't we talking about what replaces it?
I’ve been quiet here for almost three weeks.
Before you scale — my series on why startups struggle to scale — has moved to LinkedIn, where it’s finding the right audience.
If you’re building something and want to follow that, you’ll find it here.
But this newsletter you are reading-The Clarity Lens -was always about something broader. The thinking behind the thinking. And I have too many thoughts that don’t fit a how to scale-startup newsletter.
So this is where they’ll live. I hope you continue to follow me here. Otherwise, just hit the unsubscribe button at the bottom. No hard feelings, whatsoever. :)
Starting with something that’s been bothering me for weeks.
Every week there’s a new prophecy. AI will change everything. Vibecoding will redefine work. Jobs will disappear. Jobs will reappear. We’ll all be faster, freer, more creative.
Nobody knows.
Nobody has ever known.
We have a long history of being wrong about how technology reshapes society, paired with an impressive ability to sound confident while doing it. At this point, the certainty is almost comical.
So let’s pause the theater. The future will happen whether we narrate it or not.
My LinkedIn feed has been full of it lately. Founders shipping products in a weekend. Developers building tools in hours that used to take weeks. The energy is real and I understand it — I’ve vibecoded myself, and the first time something just worked, I felt it too. The speed is genuinely remarkable.
But then I stopped and asked myself: what am I actually building? And more importantly — why?
That pause is what this article is about.
Vibecoding is speed, not progress
Vibecoding is a good example of where we are right now — a moment where the ability to execute has raced so far ahead of the ability to think that we’ve stopped noticing the gap.
What I mostly see is not a breakthrough in innovation. It’s a breakthrough in execution speed.
We can now build things extremely fast. Apps, tools, workflows, wrappers on top of wrappers. That’s impressive. It’s also largely beside the point.
Most vibecoded products help us do what we were already doing. Shop faster. Compare more options. Consume more efficiently. Produce more content.
This isn’t innovation. It’s acceleration inside the same frame. In a frame with high attention deficit.
We are getting very good at solving problems that probably shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Judgment was always important. Now it’s everything
Even when building things was hard, judgment mattered.
Choosing the right problem. Knowing what not to build. Understanding second-order effects. Resisting the obvious solution.
Now building is cheap. Sometimes trivial.
Which means judgment is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s the scarce resource.
In a world where anyone can generate code, text, products, and ideas on demand, the differentiator is not capability. It’s discernment. Taste. Style. The ability to say no.
And yet this is the one skill we seem least interested in developing.
First principles have been replaced by vibes
I was trained in physics. You didn’t start by solving the problem. You started by interrogating it.
Why does this problem exist? What assumptions created it? What happens if those assumptions are wrong?
Only then did you touch the math.
Most modern tech discourse skips this entirely.
Instead, we ask how fast we can build, how cheap we can ship, how impressive the demo looks. Vibecoding is perfect for this mindset. It makes it easier than ever to move without thinking.
Motion is mistaken for progress. Output for insight.
Save us for what, exactly?
I keep hearing about AI freeing up our time.
For what?
So a robot can do my laundry while I scroll more efficiently. So thousands lose their jobs while we celebrate frictionless consumption. So we can generate even more content that nobody asked for.
We talk about time saved as if time automatically turns into meaning. It doesn’t.
In a world already drowning in distraction, free time without judgment just gets filled with more noise.
The real divide isn’t technical
The future won’t be shaped by the fastest builders or the loudest futurists.
It will be shaped by a small minority of people who still have judgment.
People who can tell the difference between a real problem and a manufactured one. People who can ignore most options instead of celebrating infinite choice. People who can sit with uncertainty instead of filling it with output.
Everyone else will be busy vibecoding solutions to things that don’t matter.
I don’t want predictions. I want standards.
I don’t care how the world will look in ten years.
What I care about is whether we’re willing to develop judgment in a time that actively discourages it.
Less future cosplay. Less hype. Less speed for the sake of speed.
More first-principles thinking. More restraint. More courage to say, “This is pointless.”
That would be real progress.
Before you scale — my series on why startups struggle to scale — has moved to LinkedIn, where it’s finding the right audience.
If you’re building something and want to follow that, you’ll find it here.