It was about 10 days ago. I didn't open iTerm2 and call Claude until after 9 p.m., once I had gotten home from work. The goal was simple: build a landing page for the launch of Vibe Labs. (The original idea was Hashed Vibe Camp, which we also renamed in the middle of the night.) It took less than 30 minutes to produce the first early version. A white background, refined typography, gradient buttons, tasteful animations, and a perfectly responsive design. It had all the bones of a decent website in the style of the times. But I wasn't feeling it. I thought it might be a design problem, so I changed the colors and twisted the layout to make a second version. Another 30-minute job. It wasn't bad, but it still felt empty. It was simply a "well-made website," nothing more and nothing less.
I wasted another couple of hours that way. It wasn't until around 1 a.m. that I realized the problem wasn't the general quality. In the age of vibe coding with AI, anyone can make a polished landing page. We were launching a "program for builders of a new era." Was it right to greet them with a cookie-cutter website that anyone could make? I changed direction completely. I decided to abandon the familiar GUI and return to a rough terminal. A black screen with a blinking cursor. System resource text like "MEM: 48MB" and "CPU: 2%." A CLI interface that wouldn't give up its information until you typed a command. What kind of interface could create hidden moments of fun? How should I set the tempo of the interactions? Instead of smoothness, I wrestled with the details.
I was convinced that this inconvenience would become a filter. Some people would leave saying, "What is this?" But the people we were looking for would tap at the keyboard saying, "Oh, this is fun." The landing page itself had to be proof. Proof that Hashed isn't a VC that only provides capital, but a place where people stay up all night writing code and building products themselves. At 6:50 a.m., I pushed the final commit and finished the deployment. What I felt in the stillness before dawn wasn't relief, but conviction.
The essence of the vibe coding era is not "production," but "judgment." The act of making itself has become incredibly easy. Since anyone can produce something that looks plausible, the question of "what should we make, and why?" has become more important than ever. The polished page I made first was close to the right answer, but it wasn't our story. Only after I changed it to a terminal UI did the site finally begin to speak.
The people Hashed is looking for are ultimately people like that. People who reject what anyone can make. People obsessed with an almost freakish level of perfection and detail. In an age when AI can make anything, people with the persistence to stubbornly create something different from everyone else.
vibelabs.hashed.com
