---
schema: 1
type: term
title: vibe prompting
description: >-
  **Vibe prompting** is prompting an AI at the level of feel — mood,
  personality, and intent — instead of writing fully scripted responses. In this
  channel's material, it describes how Portola shaped **Tolan**, a voice AI
  alien companion: the character's storytelling and dialogue were handled
  improvisationally and its world was co-authored with users, rather than fixed
  line by line in advance.
canonical: >-
  https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/explore/term/vibe-prompting-6efac723a290
markdown: >-
  https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/explore/term/vibe-prompting-6efac723a290.md
llms: null
parent: 'https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/llms.txt'
channel: everyinc
updated: '2026-10-23T22:12:35.346Z'
language: null
children: []
---


# vibe prompting

Canonical: https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/explore/term/vibe-prompting-6efac723a290

Parent: [Channel index](https://liquidgold.cc/channel/everyinc/llms.txt)

## Definition

**Vibe prompting** is prompting an AI at the level of feel — mood, personality, and intent — instead of writing fully scripted responses. In this channel's material, it describes how Portola shaped **Tolan**, a voice AI alien companion: the character's storytelling and dialogue were handled improvisationally and its world was co-authored with users, rather than fixed line by line in advance.

In the channel's material on **Tolan** — Portola's embodied AI alien companion — *vibe prompting* describes working at the level of a character's **feel** rather than a fully scripted specification. The team's approach to story and dialogue was **storytelling by improvisation** instead of scripted narrative, and the character and world were **co-authored with users** as the product evolved [^8cb89dc1-64d7-5e28-83d0-caa2a7e07607]. That is the same posture captured by this term: you steer the model with descriptions of mood, personality, and intent, and let the specific responses emerge in interaction rather than fixing them line by line in advance.Because Tolan is a voice-first companion, scripted lines quickly break down — every user takes the conversation somewhere unexpected. Prompting by vibe let the character stay coherent while remaining improvisational, and the team then applied the same sensibility to evaluation, **engineering taste into LLM judges** so the character's felt quality could be judged at scale rather than checked against a fixed script [^8cb89dc1-64d7-5e28-83d0-caa2a7e07607].- **Vibe prompting** here means guiding an AI character by mood, personality, and intent rather than exhaustive scripts.- In the Tolan story it connects directly to **improvisation over scripted narrative** and **co-authoring character and world with users**.- The same taste-driven sensibility carried into evaluation, where **LLM judges** were tuned to the character's felt quality.- The product context is a voice companion where sub-two-second response times make pre-scripted behavior impractical.