Vibe Code Manifesto

Everyone knows the Agile Manifesto and its 12 principles, right?

Well, I recently came across the new version:

Vibe Code Manifesto

We are uncovering, like, ways of developing software by handing it off to machines and then bragging about it.

Through this work we have come to value:

- Prompting over programming

- Downloading skills over acquiring them

- Agent autonomy over developer autonomy

- Vibes over versioning

- Burning tokens over burning out

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we only read the summary of the items on the left.

We follow these principles:

1. Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of software they could have prompted themselves.

2. Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agentic processes harness change, because they have forgotten the context anyway.

3. Deliver roughly working software frequently, from a couple of seconds to an overnight run, with a preference to the maximum token usage.

4. Business people and developers must work together daily to make each other redundant.

5. Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them frontier models and the support they need, and trust that you will soon lay them off and hire them back.

6. The most efficient method of conveying information to the team is passive-aggressively editing CLAUDE.md.

7. Headcount reduction is the primary measure of progress.

8. Agentic processes promote sustainable development. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft should be able to grow along a hockey stick indefinitely.

9. Continuous attention to TikTok influencers enhances jargon usage in client meetings.

10. Simplicity, the art of minimizing the length of the prompt, is essential for reducing the human's cognitive load.

11. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing agents. So do the worst. It is essentially Schrödinger's cat, right up until you look at the code.

12. At regular intervals, the agent reflects on how to become more expensive, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.