I’m a Normie. Can Normies Really Vibe Code?
May 20, 2026 at 09:00PMYou’ve likely experienced “sludge,” even if you didn’t know it. It’s the little bureaucratic annoyances involved in attempting to cancel a service or acquire a service, the small points of customer friction that companies and governments put in your way to make accomplishing something a minor, if vivid, nightmare. Think: being on hold for two hours to cancel a television service you no longer need, only to be upselled three times before they finally grant your wish. For Wired, Chris Colin, a non-coder, decided he’d try to vibe code an app to highlight sludgy experiences. “The app I envisioned would expose this phenomenon, make the cumulative weight of these obligations a little harder to ignore,” he writes.
For as long as Silicon Valley has been selling a frictionless tomorrow, we ordinary people have been its passive shoppers—scrolling the App Store, hoping someone has gone to the trouble of building whatever we need. Enter AI and its democratizing sidekick: vibe coding. If the promise is real, suddenly we can build our own apps, as niche and trifling as we please, with zero programming skills. We merely gesture toward whatever irks us and a constellation of large language models, code generators, and development environments will click their heels.
Niche and trifling? That’s me! Where others vibe code résumé reviewers and inventory trackers and automated assistants to boost their work productivity, I had a different target in mind. Over the past couple years I’ve grown particularly fixated, personally and professionally, on what the policy world calls sludge: the rising tide of tiny administrative obligations that increasingly seems to define modern existence—and corrode our ability to get anything done. The hassle of dealing with insurance, or connecting that insurance to your doctor, or staying on top of airline miles, or navigating your kid’s school portal. The steps required to dispute a charge, or unsubscribe from a streaming service you forgot you had. Each of these feels like its own discrete assault on our time. But they’re not discrete. They’re separate mushrooms sprouting from the same mycorrhizal network.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2026/05/20/combatting-sludge-wired/
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