Vibe Researching
Vibe researching: directing frontier models at a problem whose answer is published nowhere and must be assembled by inference from scattered public statements and a handful of disclosed anchors. The subject was frontier inference serving margins. The prototype took a day and carried a credential that read as validation, a replay matching DeepSeek's disclosure-derived margin to a tenth of a point, which dissolved under review into two canceling errors. What followed was four days of verification: six releases, gate verdicts of NO-SHIP three separate times, nine simulated readers finding sixteen defects severe enough to block publication, a typed provenance taxonomy for every claim, and an outside model review whose eighteen findings adjudicated to six real. The revision tax from post 035 holds one level up, at a worse ratio, and the final read came from the one audience no model can stand in for: real readers, informally, with good vibes.