Can you quantify humanity? I’m 4 bugs away.

_{Day 125/100}

Hey—It's Tim. 

It’s 6 a.m., coffee three is already cold, and my standing desk looks like a crime scene: notebooks,
apple-core
Post-its,
and one very judgmental chair staring back at me.

Today’s mess? VIBE Score.
The thing I’ve been building that’s either going to make our editor sing or send me into permanent debugging purgatory.

A quick recap (for the sleepy scrollers)

VIBE = Viewpoint, Individuality, Beat, Evidence.
Think SurferSEO, but instead of keyword density it asks:

• Do you actually have something to say?

• Does it sound like you or like ChatGPT after three espressos?

• Does the rhythm keep me tapping the space bar?

• Can you prove any of it?

If we nail this, we get content that feels human and scales.
Miss… and we’ll have built the world’s most expensive “meh” detector.

Where the wheels keep falling off

Last week I interviewed another AI about the project (yes, I’m that meta).
Highlights:

• Surface markers are a trap. Early prototype gave bonus points for every “empathetic” word. Writers gamed it by copy-pasting Brene Brown quotes.
  Scores shot up, quality nosedived.
  

• Sentence-by-sentence ≠ reality. Great writing ebbs and flows. A 250-word sliding window catches cadence, but overlap duplicates everything and tanks scores.
  

• Academic datasets are tidy liars. Research papers grade neat 1,000-word samples. Real articles sprawl, digress, and occasionally forget they’re articles at all (hi, blog rants).
  

• My code says 11, the AI says 18. Someone’s wrong. Spoiler: it’s probably me.

I’m basically juggling four flaming bowling pins while learning to juggle.

So… can you bottle “human”?

Google’s yelling “Helpful! Experience! Expertise!” from the rooftops.
Readers crave opinions with a pulse.

Yet here I am, trying to turn gut-feel craft into deterministic math.

Is that sacrilege?

Am I wrong?

Part of me thinks yes. The other part remembers spending ten years watching good articles die because no one could prove they were good.

Maybe VIBE is less “codifying humanity” and more “turning on the lights.”

A nudge that says: your viewpoint disappeared in paragraph six — bring it back.
A mirror that catches the copy-and-paste empathy before it hits publish.

I don’t want writers to game the score.
I want the score to game the writer into writing better stuff.

The bit I’m stuck on

How do you reward flow without letting someone loop the same brilliant paragraph ten times?
Rolling window feels right, but duplication destroys variance.
Slice it smaller and you lose the music entirely.

If you have a trick, a paper, or a sympathetic meme - my inbox is open.
Otherwise I’ll be here, refreshing VS Code and whisper-swearing at TF-IDF plots.

This is all very messy, but the mission’s clear: help you make content feel like a human sat down and cared.

If VIBE gets us there, the pain will be worth it.

See you tomorrow.

✌️ Tim "11 > 18" Hanson
CMO @Penfriend.ai

Same brain, different platforms: X, Threads, LinkedIn.

P.S. I’ll be dropping this to the beta testers this week.
If you want in, reply. I’ll get you on the list.

Penfriend.ai
Made by content marketers. Used by better ones.