Welcome to the 28th edition of Black Box. I rarely focus on a single company, but I think that in this case, speculating on its strategy has interesting implications on vibe coding. Enjoy!
I was catching up with my friend Catherine after Delty, the startup that she co-founded with a fellow Googler, graduated from YC’s newest cohort when she said something familiar: “We’re trying to help people write better code, but everyone expects Delty to just write it for them because they’re so used to vibe coding.” It was familiar because Lex, the AI-assisted (prose) writing platform where I led user research and GTM strategy, faced the same issue. We tried to show people that their writing was stronger when AI wrote with them and not for them through personalized onboarding, user guides, even a writing club — but ultimately, most of our users were neutral or against AI as a substitution for writing in the first place.
Why couldn’t we convert more “vibe writers”? An obvious answer is that it’s easier to compose a prompt than a whole essay. That’s the pull reason, but I think there’s also a push reason: Discourse on “vibe X” has overwhelmingly paternalistic undertones and casts judgement on those who do so such that turning to collaborative AI is equivalent to admitting laziness and the other accusations. This completely ignores the reality that most people will “vibe X” anyway, and the resulting moral panic distracts from the actual dangers of blindly trusting AI for thinking work. Having tried this messaging at Lex, I would do things differently if I were Catherine.
Disclaimer: I don’t have any insight on what Delty plans to do — if you’re curious, reach out at catherine[at]delty[dot]ai. The following is simply what I recommend and may not reflect what Delty is actually building.
People talk about vibe coding like they talk about losing weight. You should be designing systems yourself instead of relying on agents in the same way that you should eat more vegetables — the nagging feels good for the nagger but doesn’t help their target. I think it’s more effective to accept that people will always eat junk food (for whatever reason and without judgement) and focus on developing the Ozempic that helps them lose the weight after.
What that means for Delty is I think it should be a companion to vibe coding instead of an alternative. The fact is that vibe coding is faster and easier and these qualities are generally rewarded over clean code in practice. Even the occasional horror story of a massive OpenAI bill due to exposed API keys is not enough to deter talented engineers working against ambitious shipping schedules. So rather than preaching about some imminent Big Refactoring, Delty should actively help prevent it by identifying the problems created by vibe coding and suggesting (but not generating) solutions. Put another way, Delty should assume vibe coding as the norm and position itself as an add-on that closes the delta between what the code is trying to be and what it is, namely by making it robust and hardening it.
With this approach, the best case scenario is Delty catches something huge, saves the company from disaster, and becomes a permanent part of its vibe coding workflow. The worst case scenario is the vibed code is relatively free of issues and Delty simply proofread and gave it the green light. But even in that case, I think companies would be willing to pay for the peace of mind à la insurance — except Delty is a significantly better deal because it does find something most of the time.
If this (hypothetical) version of Delty succeeds, it will help companies learn what kind of code work has to be done by engineers and what can be left to AI without the “lessons” (i.e., consequences of bad vibe code) becoming too expensive. On an individual level, engineers who write code collaboratively with agents will figure out what AI is good at and what needs to be checked. And if coding agents ever become as good as human engineers, I think that this version of Delty will have likely played a big part. After all, you can’t fix what you don’t know is wrong.
So enjoy the seafood buffet. Only by eating will people see that some of the fish is past its expiration date, and that some other fish taste much better if they’re freshly-caught. Delty will make sure no one gets food poisoning and have the poles ready when people are ready to be taught. ∎
If you vibe code, how do you check the output (if at all)? Let me know @jwang_18 or over LinkedIn!