Crit
How to look at vibecoded work. A framework for the critique room, where some of what is being shown was written with the help of a language model — and some of it wasn't, and the line isn't always where you expect.
The question in the crit is not whether a work is synthetic, but how synthesis is organized. Every work distributes agency, legibility, labor, and consequence differently. A vibecoded shader — part the artist's hand, part the model's suggestion, part someone's Stack Overflow answer from 2014 — is a particular arrangement of all four. The framework below is built to make that arrangement legible without forcing the conversation into a pro-AI / anti-AI stance.
It also tries to keep the work itself at the center, and to keep the artist out of the defendant's chair.
Three kinds of system
A useful working vocabulary before the room starts talking.
- Brittle
- Systems whose seams, failures, and parameter limits remain visible and materially usable. Glitches, artifacts, and breakdowns are part of the vocabulary.
- Smooth
- Systems optimized for plausibility, completion, and frictionless finish. Interfaces hide the pipeline. Visible error is suppressed.
- Vibecoded
- Procedural legibility, iterative steering, and pipeline construction — even when the tools are highly automated or LLM-mediated. Rather than accepting the first plausible output, the artist orchestrates models, prompts, scripts, interfaces, and edits into a discernible procedure.
The five strata of synthesis
Most contemporary work crosses strata. Naming them makes the crossing visible.
- Handmade & captured
- Drawing, painting, camera-based, analog, optical, and composited work.
- Procedural & constructed
- CGI, 3D modeling, motion graphics, scripting, rule-based or parametric systems.
- Generative, model-driven
- Early or visibly unstable systems, style transfer, GAN-era work, and custom pipelines that retain recognizable seams or instability.
- Completion-oriented
- One-shot systems optimized for finish, plausibility, and seamless illustration.
- Vibecoded
- Works built through iterative scripting, orchestration, chaining, functional transfer, and interface-level construction across multiple tools.
The opening statement
Before discussion begins, the artist gives a short, factual opening. Its purpose is to situate the work, not to explain it in advance or defend it before the conversation begins.
- Name the main strata of synthesis at work in this piece.
- Identify the main tools, models, or software used.
- Describe the main source material, data, or imagery involved.
- Note any key functions or behaviors transferred from other contexts.
- Mention any essential notes about authorship, intellectual property, or environmental impact.
Then the artist stops. The room speaks.
Three lenses
The conversation moves through three lenses, in sequence. The formal before the systemic. The systemic before the consequential. Keeping the order keeps the work in view.
What is in the work?
- What do you notice first?
- What holds up formally — composition, timing, rhythm, color, texture, space, affect?
- What feels specific, convincing, or surprising?
- What feels generic, overdetermined, unresolved, or thin?
- What remains meaningful if we temporarily set aside the question of how it was made?
How is the system organized?
- What appears to be authored, what appears to be automated, and what appears to be curated?
- Where does control seem to sit in this work?
- Are the seams of the system visible, hidden, or strategically mixed?
- If instability, artifacts, or glitches are present, are they functioning as real material or merely as style?
- If the work aims for smoothness or completion, what is gained and what is hidden?
- Does the artist simply use a tool, or transform it into part of a personal vocabulary?
- What functions, behaviors, or modules have been extracted, adapted, or transferred from another context?
- How much procedural legibility does the work retain?
What consequences are entangled?
- What prior image worlds, styles, archives, or conventions seem embedded here?
- How clear is the provenance of the imagery, model, or dataset?
- What kinds of labor are present but not immediately visible?
- What questions of appropriation, licensing, scraping, or intellectual property seem to matter here?
- What environmental impact is part of this process, and does that impact seem necessary to the work?
- How do these conditions alter your reading of the work?
Artist reflection
After the room has spoken, the artist speaks last.
- What was the most useful observation you heard?
- What part of the conversation felt most accurate to the work?
- What part of the conversation felt mistaken or projected?
- What would you revise in the work, or in the pipeline, after this crit?
A note on tone
The crit is not a confession booth. The artist should not be asked to defend the work before discussion begins, nor asked to justify the tools as if they were on trial. The work comes first; the pipeline next; the consequences last. The order matters. It keeps the conversation rigorous without making it punitive, and it preserves room for disagreement across hand-drawn, procedural, generative, and vibecoded practices.
The aim is not to sort work into synthetic and non-synthetic categories, but to understand more clearly how each pipeline organizes control, responsibility, and visibility.