vibe coding has killed my sanity

As a certain comedian once said, about a completely unrelated topic, you shouldn’t vibe code. Unless, you really, really need to vibe code. In which case, you really should vibe code. (I’m paraphrasing.)

My personal vibe coding journey started very innocently. “Just try it,” said one of my good friends. “It’s fun. Just a little puff,” they said.

It’s been 6 months now, and the effects of that puff have yet to wear off.

Vibe coding is addictive, intoxicating, and all-encompassing - building as fast as you can think, shipping features in minutes, and always being ready for more. For somebody who has built stuff the normal way, it’s hard to describe the feeling of elation seeing something that went from your head to your browser’s front-end in a matter of hours rather than weeks.

Vibe coding has opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. And given the number of “try my awesome new app” posts on Reddit, I suspect it’s opened up a new world for lots of other people, too. As well it should.

how i feel when i’m with AI. yes, i’m the girl.

Simply by chatting deliberately into a blinking cursor inside a terminal prompt, worlds can be created, entirely on our own, beyond anything we previously thought was possible. Worlds that were reserved for the realms of large and well-funded development teams, or the genius, dedicated, full-stack solo dev, are now accessible to literally anyone with the willpower, tenacity, and gumption to learn a new way of working, provided we have a couple of bucks on hand to pay for tokens.

In my 20-year IT career, building real, marketable software has never been anything but a team sport, done by professionals. Vibe coding has made it personal.

Coding with AI is like being a worker ant and the emperor of the universe at the same time. I throw a prompt at the machine, then lean back in my chair, a cigar between my teeth, laughing like the newspaper editor in Spider-Man. I’m Gru, putting my minions to work.

you shall not rest until you have done my bidding

On the other hand, nobody is around to see your triumphant creations, and when things go wrong, which they inevitably do, you’re back to digging into code and micro-managing your glorious claude-bot to work it out. Oh, and by the way, in case it matters, nobody in the world knows or cares about this thing you’re building.

Coding has always been fundamentally lonely. You’re working with yourself, and nobody can debug your code better than you. Running a business is different - that’s sales, marketing, development, design, support, and much more.

With AI, you can now technically do all of that by yourself. Whether you should is another thing.

AI hasn’t changed what you need to build good software that sells. But the temptation to skip all the actual hard parts and just build, now that we can, is hard to ignore.

Founders, almost by design, have an incessant desire for control. Building a profitable business from the ground up is more than just building software, and it requires a certain attention to detail that is genuinely difficult to delegate. Founders now have that control at their fingertips, which is a bit like giving your car keys to your teenager. There’s an inherent danger to having this level of control, and to me that’s the risk of this thing taking over your whole life.

The fact that I’m sitting here at midnight, stressing out over an unfinished essay for my 32 followers (on a good day), is a decent indicator that I may have fallen slightly out of step with reality.

Vibe coders may also relate to the fact that, once this is done, I will almost definitely try to squeeze in “just one more prompt” for 4 more hours until I collapse from exhaustion and my family finds me, tomorrow morning, drooling onto my keyboard.

I feel like, 20 years from now, this will be a silly thing to worry about. Vibe coding will be so common that your grandmother will be doing it in her spare time. And I’ll be sitting back in a rocking chair with a piece of pine straw in my teeth, saying things like, “back in my day, 100 tokens could get you a full-stack browser-based model-view-controller finance tracking app, with enough left over to build a python log parser to boot.” And all the village children will listen to my stories with amazement and wonder.

also, youtube had a “dislike” button

For now, though, this is new territory, and I’m still figuring it out. In the meantime, all I know how to do is build. Because I really, really need to build.

Stay sane, my beans.

greg