Seeing AGI (4): Vibe Working — Toward a Three-Day Workweek for All
"This might sound crazy: I believe AI will eventually help society shift to 3-day work weeks by fundamentally transforming how we work. This transformation will be sparked by a movement—a movement I call 'vibe working.'"
In my previous three articles, I talked about AGI's arrival, how to adapt, and how to build AI-native teams. They were all about humans. This fourth piece is about a discovery that surprised me: AI isn't just changing what we can do—it will also change how work makes us feel.
Like most people, I've dealt with work stress for years. When things got overwhelming, I used to tell myself that the pressure was actually helpful—that struggling through difficult problems made me more creative. It was my way of coping with stress and staying motivated. But over the past 18 months, something unexpected happened. As I started working with AI more, I noticed I wasn't relying on that old mindset anymore. Not because I was trying to avoid pressure, but because the work itself felt different—less stressful, more collaborative. AI was helping me solve problems in ways that felt more natural and enjoyable. This shift in how work feels is what I call "vibe working" and I think it represents something important about the future of human-AI collaboration.
What Is Vibe Working?
To understand vibe working, start with how Andrej Karpathy defined "vibe coding": "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." He described a way of programming where you stop trying to control every detail and instead flow with AI's capabilities, accepting suggestions without scrutinizing every line, letting the AI fix errors through conversation rather than debugging manually.
What I've discovered is that this phenomenon extends far beyond coding. Vibe working is what happens when you apply this same mindset to any type of work—strategy, design, writing, analysis, planning. It is when you stop thinking you are in charge, fully delegate your work, and start enjoying the process of collaborating on work with a super-intelligent co-worker.
You're not "using AI tools" anymore—you're improvising together, like musicians jamming or athletes moving as one team. The output feels alive because it emerged from a genuine creative process rather than a predetermined execution.
What strikes me most is the emotional shift. Traditional work often feels like pushing against resistance—fighting through complexity, forcing solutions, grinding toward outcomes. Vibe working feels like riding technology waves and flowing with momentum. You finish sessions energized rather than drained, excited rather than relieved, because you genuinely enjoyed the creative process.
My Personal Journey Into Vibe Working
The shift to vibe working happened gradually for me. In early 2023, I was using AI like everyone else—asking it to write emails, summarize documents, answer specific questions. This was standard tool usage.
My breakthrough came during the development of Genspark's AI Slides feature. Creating presentations used to be a time-consuming process: weeks of research, learning new concepts and knowledge, distilling key insights, writing outlines, then asking my colleague to beautify the slides.
But when I first used our super agent-powered AI Slides, I was stunned. It would query multiple sources, generate compelling content, and create sophisticated visual designs—all in one shot. It collected information more comprehensively than I could, crafted design styles I didn't know how to create, and expressed ideas I'd never considered but that resonated deeply. What used to take weeks now took 5-10 minutes.
The psychological transformation was profound. My internal monologue shifted from skepticism—"This isn't good enough," "There are errors," "It's just okay"—to genuine amazement: "Holy shit, this is incredible," "This is way better than what I could do," "What should I do in the future?"
I realized something fundamental about human psychology: when we haven't been surpassed by a machine, we instinctively find flaws. But the moment a machine clearly exceeds our capabilities, our response shifts to existential questioning: "What do I even contribute anymore?"
That's when everything changed. Once I acknowledged that AI was significantly more capable than me in many areas, I stopped fighting it and started flowing with it. When I embraced this collaboration, I physically relaxed. Our relationship transformed from human-tool interaction to genuine collaboration. I entered vibe working mode.
My mindset became: when results aren't what I expected, it usually means I need to give my AI partner more context. Good AI collaboration is like good human collaboration—it's all about clear communication. This shift was mentally liberating and physically energizing. My work efficiency skyrocketed.
This transformation wasn't unique to me. Our entire Genspark team went through this psychological transition. We now ship new products weekly, with AI writing 80% of our code. Paradoxically, as AI handles more of my work, my stress levels have decreased while my efficiency has grown exponentially.
I believe this experience will soon become universal—every person and every organization will undergo this same psychological and operational transformation.
The Four Levels of Vibe Working
Through extensive practice and observation of our team's evolution, I've identified four distinct levels of human-AI collaboration:
Level 1: Skeptical Tool Use
We ask, AI answers, but we instinctively find flaws. Our internal monologue runs: "This isn't good enough," "There are errors," "It's just okay." We maintain complete control over direction and decisions, constantly second-guessing AI outputs. This is where most of us start and where many of us get stuck—not because AI isn't capable, but because we haven't acknowledged its capabilities yet.
Level 2: Productive Delegation
We delegate specific tasks while maintaining overall strategy, but we're still operating from a position of superiority. AI handles execution while we focus on high-level guidance. This feels productive and maintains traditional work hierarchies, but we're missing the exponential potential because we're still thinking like managers rather than collaborators.
Level 3: Collaborative Flow
The psychological breakthrough happens here. We've acknowledged that AI significantly exceeds our capabilities in many areas, so we stop fighting it and start flowing with it. We engage in genuine back-and-forth collaboration where AI challenges our assumptions and we challenge it back. Our mindset shifts to: "Any time AI produces poor results, it must be due to how we're using it." This is where vibe working begins and stress levels start decreasing.
Level 4: Creative Symbiosis
This is the magic level. We and the AI co-create in real-time, building on each other's contributions so seamlessly that we stop tracking who contributed what idea. We finish sessions energized rather than drained, excited rather than relieved. Traditional planning dissolves into genuine emergence—solutions that feel alive because they emerged from creative collaboration rather than predetermined execution. Once we experience this, traditional work feels painfully slow and limited.
How to Get Into Vibe Working Mode Faster
The biggest barrier isn't technical—it's psychological. Most of us approach AI like we're the boss giving orders to an assistant. But vibe working happens when you start treating AI like a brilliant colleague.
Start small. Don't begin with your most important work project. Try something basic like drafting a report or slides, without manually editing anything, just prompting.
Share your uncertainty and provide more context through multi-turn conversations. Instead of asking "How do I solve X?", try "I'm trying to figure out X, but I'm confused about Y and worried about Z." The magic happens when you externalize your thought process rather than just asking for answers.
Avoid the "testing" mindset—stop treating AI like a tool you're evaluating. Instead of one-shot prompt testing, adopt a super-intelligent coworker mindset where you engage in ongoing collaboration and iterative refinement.
Embrace the mindset: "I've learned to treat AI like a brilliant colleague—one who needs context, not mind-reading." I want to be transparent—I have no intention of promoting my own product in this article series. I wrote this to genuinely share my thoughts with friends and colleagues. However, I must note that as of now, Genspark is the only fully agentic platform where you can truly experience this type of collaborative flow if you genuinely embrace it and feel what I'm describing.
Those who liberate themselves first will achieve the greatest productivity liberation and emotional fulfillment.
Final Thoughts
We're witnessing the emergence of a new way to work—one that feels fundamentally different from the stress-driven, grinding mentality we've accepted as normal.
Vibe working isn't just about productivity gains; it's about getting more relaxation and time from work, and putting that extra time elsewhere—either with family or other things we love.
The transition is inevitable.