The new way we pretend to know everythingPerformance on the surface, unfinished understanding underneathWe are in the age of vibemaking, the feeling of competence without comprehension delivered by AI. You can ship an app without learning to code, cook a restaurantquality meal without understanding heat or timing, and write a passable essay without mastering prose. The results feel great, the learningdoesnt.Simulation of mastery is changing our standards. We are getting comfortable with a goodenough economy that confuses fluency with understanding, speed with judgment, and patternmatching with innovation. It makes life easier, and can make us worse at the kind of thinking that creates new things. As workplaces rapidly adopt AI, we risk training performance over understanding.I learned this the slow way. I was the kid who wanted to be an inventor, building contraptions from toys and scrap that were more adorable than useful. That path led to industrial design and then to digital product design. Almost a decade ago, my first job was in a fabrication lab on a noontomidnight shift. After dark, it was my studio: a laser cutter singing, a 3D printer tracing tight spirals. I made chairs you could assemble without screws, sculptures that resembled equations, objects that drew wows, not breakthroughs. I could run the machines, but without real domain knowledge and the judgment to use it, I couldnt push past interesting shapes into anything fundamentally new. Better tools made me faster, notdeeper.Better tools make you faster, notdeeperAI scales that feeling. Im a terrible host, the kind who nails the playlist and forgets plates exist. I asked a model for conversation starters, a seating plan, even gentle exit lines for shy guests. For a few hours I felt like my mom, a natural at this. I had the performance of mastery without the years that gave her the instincts.Vibecoding lets AI draft most of the code from plainlanguage prompts. Cooking has its own version: vibecooking. Describe the dish and a plan appears. No need to know how acids balance fat or why a sauce breaks. The meal lands, and you learn almost nothing. Writing can be vibewriting as well. Bring a decent idea and some structure, and the model sands the edges into competent prose. You can become a vibetherapist too. Pour a situation into a chat and minutes later dispense therapyscented advice to friends or to yourself.The result lands. The lesson oftendoesntThis is great. We can all vibemake sometimes. It works as long as you treat it as performance, not practice. The trouble is when pretend becomes the standard. Scale that across classrooms and workplaces, and it changes what we try to build. If every path is smooth, we forget how to cut a newone.Real innovation likes friction. Constraints force us to model the problem, test principles, and get things wrong in ways we can learn from. In the fabrication lab, my ignorance kept me to furniture and shapes. That limitation also made me ask better questions: Why does this joint fail, and how could this chair be distinct? AI flips the incentives. It gives you a passable version early, which feels like progress, so you stop before you wrestle with the thing that would have made the work original.I do not want to meet a vibesurgeon. Health, safety, and public decisionmaking need slow wisdom, not fast fluency. You can see the same risk in softer crafts: a master hairdresser reading texture, weight, and growth patterns before a single cut. That authority comes from years of deliberate practice, from a body that knows before the brain can phrase it. Treat that knowledge as an aesthetic, rather than a substance, and we will keep the look while losing the mind insideit.A body that knows before the brain can phraseitWe defer to confident outputs. Give us a crisp, neatly formatted answer, and we nod. When a tool speaks in our voice and lays out a chain of steps, it invites overreliance. The more often that works, the more often we skip the pause where judgmentlives.The lingering question is agency: who serves whom? For now, we drive (autonomous vehicles aside). But as AI gets better at proposing ideas and pruning options, we start to follow its grooves. What feels like augmentation can turn into compliance, where we execute the patterns the tool surfaces instead of developing ourown.What helps is judgment. Keep using the tools, raise standards, and reward real understanding. As AI takes on more, the people who define principles and use the tools to extend their own judgment will do the shaping. Those who only perform will become operators.Crisp answers invite overreliance. Judgment asks for apauseIf you want to learn rather than perform, change how you use the tools. Use them where you already have a base, and if they make you feel smarter than you are, buy that feeling the honest way with study or reps. Start cold, then ask for help: make the first pass yourself, and only then use the model to critique and refine, noting what changed and why. Keep constraint in the loop by adding friction on purpose. Timebox assistance or build one version by hand, then analyze what went wrong. We remember what we struggle to create. Show your work with concise process notes that clearly separate your reasoning from the tools output and include a few dead ends, not just glossy results. And in schools and hiring, test fundamentals by pairing AIpermitted tasks with AIfree ones, so we measure judgment, not just prompting skill.There is one more benefit to protecting spaces without a net. They keep humility alive. When you wrestle with material, code, ingredients, and people, you rediscover how much you do not know. That feeling is not pleasant, but it is a reliable compass. It keeps you learning. It also makes success feel earned, and that is its ownfuel.Vibemaking is not going away, and I dont want it to. It can open doors for people kept outside by jargon, money, or gatekeepers. It can help experts move faster on the parts that do not need to be slow. A tool that raises your ceiling is a gift. A tool that lowers your floor is atrap.If we treat vibemaking as a costume, we will train a generation of performers who execute well yet cannot innovate or see the underlying problem. If we treat it as a set of power tools, we can build structures worth living in. The difference is not in the tools. Its in themaker.Use vibemaking to raise the ceiling, not to lower thefloor.All images were created by theauthorRodrigo Osornio is a San Francisco-based product designer with training in visual arts and industrial design. He started in a fablabs and now designs software products. He is passionate about how science and technology shape human interaction.The vibemaking illusion was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.