Promptxiety and the Tyranny of Perfect Vibecode

— an anxious love letter to the people who edit their own thoughts before the algorithm can judge them

A confession: I have drafted this sentence three times already, each revision an offering to the resident deity of Large Language Models. I’m not alone in the ritual. At 3 a.m., across the planet, insomniacs hover over Regenerate with the same white-knuckled devotion once reserved for Undo.

I call the condition promptxiety — an existential dread that the tiniest typo or missing comma will summon an AI gremlin who, like a deranged sous-chef, flambes your entire codebase instead of just sauteing the comments.

promptxiety noun /ˈprɒmptˌzaɪ.ə.ti/ (uncountable · informal)

1. A state of anxious overthinking that arises while crafting a prompt for an artificial-intelligence system, fueled by fear that an imprecise request will produce erroneous, overwhelming, or unmanageable output.
   • “Her promptxiety peaked at 2 a.m. as she rewrote the same sentence for the chatbot’s twelfth regeneration.”

If the 2010s asked us to “learn to code,” the 2020s respond, darkly, “learn to ask the thing that codes.” And so we stand before the oracle: ChatGPT. One misphrased directive and the oracle gifts you a thousand lines of syntactically perfect nonsense, the digital equivalent of a wish…