A quick reminder: Law://WhatsNext is our vehicle to explore through dialogue (or occasional reflection) how leading lawyers, educators and technologists are using emerging tech to evolve how we practice and administer legal services. No hype; just practical conversations.
🎙️ This week we sat down with Chris Bridges and Matt Pollins, two legal technologists who happen to live in the same small town in West Sussex and who have channelled that proximity into building vibecode.law, an open-source platform for the legal community to share, discover and upvote vibe-coded legal tech projects.
The platform launched just over a week before we recorded and already had 18 projects on it, from a SaaS inflation calculator for contract lawyers, to a Harvey for Mongolian law (yes, really), to a tool that unlocks track changes when a passive-aggressive opposing lawyer has locked them down. The conversation is wide-ranging, honest, and we think one of the most nuanced takes on the vibe coding phenomenon in legal right now.
We dig into:
Why the vibe coding debate has become absurdly polarised, and why the truth is far more interesting than either extreme
What vibecode.law actually is, where it’s heading, and why it was itself (mostly) vibe coded in a weekend
Why legal is structurally years behind engineering when it comes to benefiting from AI coding tools, and what needs to change
The shrinking feedback loop between idea and prototype, and why that matters for product development, vendor relationships and RFPs
Why the future lawyer is T-shaped, deeply curious, and probably writing their READMEs for Claude to read rather than humans
Listen Now
Available here or on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
What You’ll Learn
The polarisation problem — Vibe coding discourse in legal has split into two camps: the hype merchants and the dismissers. Chris and Matt make the case that both miss the point. The real value isn’t in shipping production software from a weekend prompt session — it’s in compressing the feedback loop between having an idea and being able to show it to someone.
Why legal can’t just copy-paste what engineering has — Chris, who’s been a developer for ~25 years, lays out the structural reasons why AI coding tools work so well for software engineers (public documentation, standardised coding practices, automated testing, linting) and why legal simply doesn’t have that infrastructure yet. The adversarial nature of law — where “the right way to draft a clause” depends on which side of the deal you’re on — makes standardisation fundamentally harder.
Vibe coding as a communication tool — Both Chris and Matt see enormous potential in using vibe coding not as a replacement for engineering, but as a radically better way to communicate requirements. Imagine an RFP that’s a working prototype instead of a 40-page document nobody reads. Imagine a customer call where you vibe code the feature request together in real time.
Responsible vibe coding — Matt flags that we’re probably 6–12 months away from someone exposing confidential data via a carelessly deployed vibe-coded app. The platform is thinking about how to drive education around safe practices without crushing the enthusiasm.
The “user is Claude” era — One of our favourite moments: Chris and Matt discovering that their real user for documentation isn’t a human developer — it’s an LLM. They’ve pivoted to writing READMEs in a “vibe-friendly” way because contributors are just going to paste them into Claude anyway. Which tracks with the wider trend of websites now including LLMs.md files optimised for AI readers. Maybe contracts are next?
About Our Guests
Chris Bridges is Co-Founder & COO at Tacit Legal, a developer-turned-lawyer-turned-legal-ops-builder who’s been writing code since he was 10. He’s currently building Tilda, Tacit’s AI-native contract review product.
Matt Pollins is Co-Founder & CPO at Lupl, an ex-BigLaw partner (CMS) turned legal tech product leader. He writes about the delivery of legal work through humans and AI at agents.law — well worth a subscribe.
Key References
vibecode.law — The open-source platform for sharing legal vibe coding projects. Community-driven, non-commercial, and open for submissions.
Chris’s article on why legal is behind engineering — The piece Tom references on the structural gap between AI coding tools for engineers vs. what’s available to lawyers. Linked in the show notes.
Google AI Studio — Matt and Chris’s recommendation for complete beginners looking to try vibe coding for the first time. Free, low barrier to entry.
The Daily AI Show — Matt’s daily go-to for staying on top of the pace of change. Because if you go offline for a weekend, you’ll miss an entire hype cycle.
We hope you enjoy this one as much as we did. If you’re curious about vibe coding but haven’t started yet — this might be the nudge. And if you’ve already built something, go submit it to vibecode.law. You’ll be in good company alongside Mongolian legal AI and the track changes liberator 🤗
Tom & Alex
