It’s Blogvent, day 13, where I blog daily in December!

I don’t mean to make this a hardcore hot take, but… vibe coding is boring.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been trying it out, and it can be fairly effective. It’s innovative. I started my app PocketCal with AI and it worked pretty well, in addition to some personal apps I’ve made for myself.

I have been playing around with Spec Kit and sudocode this week (full disclaimer, Spec Kit is from GitHub, where I work, and sudocode sponsored my newsletter this week) and it’s really great how powerful it is to be able to define good specifications, hand them off to some agents, and then make my side projects an actual reality instead of losing motivation after buying a domain name.

That being said… after doing the cool thinking work and creating the specifications, after I hand things off to the agent, I get bored. I have GitHub Copilot building something literally as I write this blog post. There’s a handful of personal tools I’ve been making for myself and it’s fun to have the final result, but I’ve literally dozed off watching the agents work multiple times this week, because they aren’t interesting in the editor. Just watching the code being written instead of doing anything is like this era’s “watching paint dry” or “watching grass grow.” Or better, “my code’s compiling.”

I don’t know if this is necessarily a bad thing. This is the future that AI companies are pitching, to “give the boring work to the computer so that you can do the interesting work.” But as I work more with these tools in and outside of work, I have really re-learned how much I do love coding, and don’t find it that tedious. I don’t really like vibe coding. There’s no joy in it. There’s no “YAY I am a GENIUS because I FIGURED IT OUT” feeling. It’s just there. It’s boring.

For apps that I want to ship to the world, for this website, for apps that are using an interesting tech stack, I will be driving development, because I like it, and I have enough experience to have opinions on how they should be built.

But for the apps where I just care about the final output, that’s what vibe coding is for, I suppose. I don’t ever want to rely on it so much that I lose my own skills, but it is nice getting those results faster if I truly don’t care how something works (which is rare, but I have a few projects in the pile that are finally built now, so yay). But yeah. It’s not fun. It’s just another tool in the tool belt. And it’s really boring.