Vibe Years: Why You Feel Behind Despite Moving Faster Than Ever

I've been thinking about a concept I'm calling "vibe years."

It's like light years, but for AI and software development.

In the universe, even if you're traveling at the speed of light, you're not really catching up -- because the universe itself is expanding. The distance grows while you move.

That's where we are right now.

We're moving faster than ever. But the opportunity space is expanding even faster.

We're Looking in the Wrong Direction

Measuring Against the Past

We're still measuring progress by comparing to where we've come from -- the last two decades of software engineering. But that's the wrong direction entirely.

My Tesla supposedly has a thousand horses in it. A thousand horses. We're still measuring electric motors as though our cars were chariots -- and somehow nobody thinks that's weird.

That's where the whole industry is right now. Weekend projects reinventing Slack. Hackathons rebuilding Linear. AI-powered startups recreating the same project management software we've had for years. It's the software equivalent of using a thousand horses to describe an electric motor -- technically impressive, but completely missing the point of what's actually possible now.

The potential isn't in recreating what we've had. It's in conceiving what we haven't.

The Productivity Paradox

The Expanding Frontier

This is why we keep hearing this paradox:

"Why am I more productive than ever, and still feel behind?"

Not behind on execution. Behind relative to an expanding frontier of possibility.

And the faster the industry moves, the worse that feeling gets. Because:

• AI accelerates building
• which expands what's possible
• which raises expectations
• which creates more to do

So the destination keeps receding. And the instinct is to compare to what used to be hard, what used to be fast, what used to be "good enough."

Wrong frame. Wrong reference point.

What's Emerging

From Monoliths to Composability

Even modern SaaS starts to look outdated through this lens. Rigid. One-size-fits-all. Built for constraints that no longer exist.

What's emerging instead is:

This is the direction everything is moving. Not toward more abstraction, but toward more composability. Toward systems built from proven components and adapted precisely to what an organization actually needs.

The Real Shift

Focus Is the Bottleneck

And this is the real shift:

It's no longer about whether something can be built. That's becoming trivial.

The hard part is: what should be built?

Because when building is cheap, choosing wrong is expensive. We're entering a world where execution is abundant, possibility is infinite, and focus is the bottleneck.

A Renaissance, Not a Collapse

That's why everything feels off right now.

It's not collapse. It's a transition. A recalibration. A kind of renaissance.

Because in a world measured in vibe years, even traveling at light speed takes millions of years to get anywhere. Speed isn't the constraint. Direction is.

The problems in front of us are real and worth solving. But we don't have to solve them by reinventing the past.

So let's think twice about whether what we're building is worth it. Whether we're headed someplace worth going.

And then pick someplace worthwhile.

Want to explore what this shift means for your platform? We'd love to share what we've learned.