S1E5: Vibe Writing: How We Wrote This Book (The Isomorphic Sibling of Vibe Coding)

This podcast episode features Steve and Gene discussing "vibe writing," a parallel discipline to "vibe coding" that they developed while writing their upcoming book. Originally called "chat oriented writing" (CHOW), vibe writing emerged as they discovered striking similarities between AI-assisted programming and AI-assisted writing processes. Gene shares how he first used this approach when co-authoring "Delivering DUFFER" with Rear Admiral Andy Biehn and others, where he conducted an hour-long interview, created a detailed 4,000-word prompt, and used Claude AI to generate a high-quality narrative that surpassed his previous writing. The key insight was that effective AI writing isn't about lazily asking AI to do everything, but rather conducting expert interviews to capture domain knowledge and then collaborating with AI to refine and enhance the output.

The hosts describe how their "writer's workbench" tool enabled unprecedented productivity during their book's final six weeks, when they wrote or rewrote 80% of the text while maintaining exceptionally high quality that impressed their editors. Their process involved interviewing each other on topics, then using up to 45 different AI models in parallel to generate multiple drafts, reading through 50-70 pages of candidate text per section, and selecting the best portions to "Frankenstein" a draft, which they'd edit until they were proud of it.

They emphasize that while AI models are excellent at organizing and structuring ideas from conversations, they're poor at actual prose writing, requiring significant human oversight and rewriting. The combination of human creativity and AI assistance, following principles similar to Amazon's experimentation formula (increasing options while decreasing evaluation time), allowed them to achieve roughly 2.5x faster writing speed with 10x better quality handoffs to editors.

Pre-order the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Vibe-Coding-Bu...

The Defense of Duffers Drift: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Porta...
Delivering DUFFER: https://itrevolution.com/articles/del...
The Google Docs Add-on CHOW tool: https://github.com/realgenekim/chow-g...
00:00 Introduction to Vibe Coding with Steve and Gene
00:36 The Unwritten Chapter: Vibe Writing
00:57 Exploring Chat Oriented Programming (CHOP) and Chat Oriented Writing (CHOW)
02:17 The Writer's Workbench: A Tool for Speed and Quality
05:08 AI-Assisted Writing: A Game Changer
07:14 The Power of Prompts and AI Collaboration
11:15 Challenges and Triumphs in Vibe Writing
24:24 The Evolution of the Chow Tool
27:15 Conclusion and Upcoming Episodes