What “vibe coding” taught me about marketing — Kelford Labs Daily

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Over the summer, I vibe coded the video game I always wished existed.

It’s a procedurally-generated text-adventure game, and you have 25 turns to explore the areas, find the items and the clues, and survive the final encounter.

When you start a new game, the game engine is given a series of randomly-selected components. Things like: enemy types, the number of items and areas, the type of encounter, the type of mystery, the type of environmental details.

Then, an LLM takes all those components and generates the opening scenario and then the opening prompt. The player can then issue commands like ‘look around’, or ‘pick up item’, or ‘go through the door’, or really anything else they want to try.

Because it’s all powered by an LLM, whatever the player does, the game can respond without having to be programmed to do that specifically.

This is the kind of game I always wished existed.

But you know what? This post is not about this game.

This post is about what making this game taught me about using AI for marketing:

Vibe coding taught me that even the most up-to-date models are behind the times.

The LLM I would use to do the actual coding would constantly try to pull out old documentation, old rules, old formatting, causing me to effectively have to argue with the computer about using the correct formatting for, say, doing an API call.

Vibe coding taught me that AI models are not good at strategy.

Almost none of the logic or the systems or the strategy behind how the game works was created by an AI. I thought up all of it with my squishy organic brain. Because it would take the expedient path to every task. It would undo work it had already done. It wouldn’t think about what we might want to do next and how we should build toward that future.

And vibe coding taught me AI models want to do what they’ve seen done before.

This game didn’t exist before, so the AI models aren’t trained on how it should work. So it couldn’t come up with creative or novel solutions. I did all of that.

Because inventing anything truly new or novel is basically impossible for an LLM to invent.

But don’t you want your marketing to be up-to-date and fresh?

Don’t you want it to think long-term and strategically?

Don’t you want it to do new things no one's ever done before?

If so, then you’re gonna have to do it yourself.

You can use an LLM to aid you, to help you implement it. But the thinking must be done by you, or another real person you trust.

Because a summer of vibe coding reminded me that AI models:

• Don’t think ahead
• They’re not up-to-date
• And they’re not good at creating anything new

Which means your marketing requires you to lead it, even if you have an LLM help you build it.

Reply to this email to tell me what you think, or ask any questions!

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