How coding went from curiosity to performance and why it feels heavier now
There was a time when writing code felt closer to play than performance.
You’d open a terminal with zero expectations, hack something together, deploy it way too early, break it once or twice, laugh, learn, and somehow end the night knowing more than you did that morning. No roadmap. No metrics. No audience. Just curiosity and caffeine.
That was vibe coding. Or vibe code. Call it whatever you want it was real.
Somewhere along the way, though, the vibe left the room.
Today, we have the best tools we’ve ever had. Faster machines. Smarter editors. AI copilots whispering suggestions like a backseat driver who read the docs once. And yet… coding feels heavier. More serious. More watched. Like every commit is a performance review and every side project is secretly a résumé line.
It’s not that developers got worse. Or lazier. Or less passionate.
It’s that the incentives changed.
And when incentives change, behavior follows.
TL;DR:
Vibe coding wasn’t sloppy or unserious it was how many of us learned, explored, and fell in love with building things. This piece breaks down what vibe code actually was, why it worked, the exact moment it started disappearing, why AI isn’t the real villain, and what’s quietly replacing it now.
When vibe coding felt normal
Vibe coding didn’t feel like a phase back then. It just felt like… coding.
You opened an editor because you were curious, not because a ticket told you to. You didn’t ask, “Is this the right architecture?” You asked, “What happens if I try this?” Half the time you didn’t even know where it would end up. That was the point.
You’d spin up something scrappy. A tiny app. A script. A weekend project with a name you’d later be embarrassed by. You deployed early, usually too early, because seeing something exist on the internet was intoxicating. Logs were your monitoring. Vibes were your QA.
And when it broke? You fixed it. Or you didn’t. Sometimes you learned more from the break than the fix.
There wasn’t this constant sense of being evaluated. Your GitHub wasn’t a portfolio yet. Your side projects weren’t content. Nobody was screenshotting your commits or ranking your tech stack. Code could be bad in private. That privacy mattered more than we realized.
Vibe code thrived because the stakes were low. Low stakes meant freedom. Freedom meant experimentation. Experimentation meant learning fast the kind of learning that sticks because you earned it the hard way.
It felt a lot like sandbox mode in a game. You weren’t grinding rank. You weren’t optimizing builds. You were just messing around to see what worked. Sometimes you found something broken. Sometimes you found something brilliant. Most of the time, you just had fun.
That environment didn’t make you sloppy. It made you brave.
Why vibe code actually worked
From the outside, vibe coding looked chaotic. No diagrams. No tickets. No “proper” process. Just someone shipping half-formed ideas and learning in public or at least semi-public.
But here’s the part that gets forgotten: it worked because it optimized for flow, not polish.
When you’re vibe coding, feedback is immediate. You write something, run it, break it, tweak it, run it again. There’s no waiting for approvals or bikeshedding over names. The loop is tight, and tight loops are how humans actually learn. Not through perfect plans, but through friction and correction.
Most of the tools people rely on today didn’t start clean. Early versions were ugly, fragile, and missing features. They survived because they existed early enough to be tested by reality instead of design docs. Vibe code let ideas touch the real world before they calcified.
There’s also a psychological side people underestimate. Shipping something even something bad gives momentum. Momentum builds confidence. Confidence makes you try harder things. That progression doesn’t come from reading docs or watching tutorials. It comes from putting code out there and seeing that the world didn’t end.
I remember shipping something that I knew was rough. The structure was questionable. The naming was worse. But people used it anyway. And once they did, the next version got better not because I planned it better, but because I finally understood the problem.
That’s the dirty secret of vibe coding: learning accelerates when perfection is off the table.
Would half the tools we use today survive if their first commit had to pass today’s standards? Or would they die in review before anyone discovered why they mattered?
The exact moment vibe coding died
It didn’t vanish all at once. There wasn’t a big announcement or a dramatic breaking change. Vibe coding died the way most good things do in tech quietly, while everyone was busy “improving” things.
The turning point was visibility.
At some point, code stopped being something you did and started being something you performed. GitHub turned into a résumé. Side projects turned into personal brands. Every repo felt like it might be judged by a future manager you hadn’t met yet.
When everything is visible, experimentation becomes risky.
You stop trying weird ideas because weird ideas look bad halfway through. You stop shipping rough drafts because rough drafts feel like permanent records. The safest move becomes polishing endlessly or not starting at all.
Tooling reinforced this shift. Pipelines showed up before products. CI/CD existed before ideas were proven. Metrics arrived early, loud, and permanent. Suddenly, the question wasn’t “does this work?” but “does this look responsible?”
I remember the first time I hesitated to push code because it felt embarrassing not broken, just unfinished. That hesitation was new. And once it shows up, it doesn’t leave easily.
It’s like playing a game while streaming. Offline, you try dumb strategies. On stream, you stick to the meta. Not because it’s better, but because people are watching.
Vibe code couldn’t survive constant judgment. Creativity needs privacy. And privacy quietly disappeared.
Professionalism didn’t improve code it optimized fear
Once vibe coding faded, something else took its place. Not better craftsmanship. Not deeper thinking.
Fear.
Professionalism was supposed to make software more reliable. And in some ways, it did. Fewer obvious foot-guns. More guardrails. More checklists. But it also changed why we write code and that part gets talked about way less.
A lot of modern code isn’t written to solve problems. It’s written to survive scrutiny.
You can feel it in the abstractions. Layers that don’t add clarity, just distance. Interfaces for things that may never change. Patterns copied because they look “correct,” not because they help. Code that reads like it’s bracing for a future lawsuit instead of serving a present user.
“Future-proofing” quietly became a socially acceptable form of anxiety.
I’ve spent weeks polishing systems that never needed to exist, not because the product demanded it, but because someone might ask questions later. That’s not engineering excellence. That’s defensive programming as a coping mechanism.
The weird part is that professionalism didn’t remove mistakes it just made them harder to see. When everything is wrapped in process, failure looks smaller but lasts longer. Bugs hide behind ceremony. Bad decisions get locked in early because unwinding them would be “irresponsible.”
Vibe code allowed you to be wrong fast. Professional code encourages you to be wrong slowly and quietly.
Somewhere along the line, writing understandable code lost to writing uncriticizable code. And those are very different goals.
AI didn’t kill vibe code incentives did
It’s tempting to blame AI for all of this. Copilots everywhere. Code appearing instantly. Managers asking why something took a day when the model did it in seconds.
But AI didn’t kill vibe coding. It just exposed how little room was left for it.
The vibe was already on life support before autocomplete got smart.
What AI really did was compress expectations. Drafts became deliverables. Experiments became “wasted time.” The space between thinking and shipping collapsed, and with it, the permission to wander.
When output becomes cheap, exploration looks expensive.
That’s the real problem. Not that AI writes code, but that organizations started valuing visible output over understanding. If something can be generated instantly, the unspoken assumption is that everything should be. Slow thinking starts to look like slacking. Curiosity starts to look like inefficiency.
I’ve caught myself skipping the fun part the poking, the “what if,” the dead ends because I know I can brute-force a solution faster with a tool. And sure, the task gets done. But the learning doesn’t land the same way. The code ships, but nothing sticks.
It’s like using a calculator during practice instead of exams. You still get the answer, but your intuition never develops. Over time, you stop trusting yourself and start trusting the tool exclusively.
Vibe coding required slack. Slack time. Slack expectations. Slack consequences. AI didn’t remove those incentives did. AI just made the lack impossible to ignore.
The irony? The more powerful the tools get, the more we need protected space to use them badly, slowly, and playfully. And that’s the one thing modern dev culture keeps deleting.
What survives after vibe coding disappears
Vibe coding didn’t die. It just went underground.
You can still find it just not where metrics live. It shows up in private repos with terrible names. In half-finished folders you never plan to push. In local scripts that exist only because something annoyed you enough to fix it yourself.
That’s where play retreated when everything else became a performance.
A lot of developers quietly rebuilt their own sandboxes. No CI. No dashboards. No audience. Just code that’s allowed to be wrong, slow, and a little embarrassing. The kind of code you’d never show a recruiter, but that somehow teaches you more than anything you would show.
The pattern is always the same: when the public space gets too rigid, creativity moves somewhere quieter.
Some people do it by building offline-first tools. Others by keeping “junk repos” on purpose. Some just stop sharing entirely. Not because they’re less curious, but because curiosity doesn’t survive constant evaluation.
The uncomfortable truth is that modern dev work rarely rewards learning directly. It rewards outcomes. So if you want to keep learning, you have to protect it yourself.
Ask yourself this: what would you build if nobody ever saw it? No stars. No comments. No judgment. Just you and the problem.
That answer is where vibe code still lives.
Not dead. Just private.
The vibe always sneaks back in
Every creative field goes through this cycle. First it’s playful. Then it gets serious. Then it gets optimized. Then it gets exhausting. And eventually, someone gets tired enough to break the rules again.
That’s how the vibe comes back.
Not as a trend. Not as a manifesto. But as a quiet rebellion.
Someone builds something dumb on purpose. Someone ignores best practices just to see what happens. Someone ships a half-working idea and realizes they learned more in a week than they did all year polishing “professional” code.
And suddenly, the fun leaks back in.
The industry will probably rebrand it. Call it experimental engineering. Or creative prototyping. Or innovation sprints. It’ll get a blog post, a framework, and a conference talk. That’s fine. That’s how the cycle works.
But real vibe coding won’t live there.
It’ll live in the places without permission. In the code that never ships. In the ideas you don’t post. In the moments where you stop optimizing for how things look and start caring about how they feel to build.
If coding feels heavy right now, that’s not a personal failure. It’s a signal. A sign that the environment changed faster than the joy could adapt.
So steal it back.
Build something useless. Build something weird. Build something no one asked for. Build something badly and learn from it.
That’s not nostalgia talking.
That’s how this whole thing started in the first place.
Conclusion
If you’ve been feeling a low-grade friction every time you open your editor, you’re not imagining it.
Coding didn’t suddenly get harder. You didn’t lose curiosity. You didn’t “age out” of enjoying this work. The environment changed. The incentives shifted. And vibe coding that loose, playful, low-stakes way most of us learned wasn’t designed to survive constant evaluation.
That doesn’t mean it failed. It means it outgrew the spotlight.
Vibe code was never about being reckless or unserious. It was about learning fast, failing safely, and letting ideas breathe before they had to justify their existence. When everything became visible, optimized, and measurable, that breathing room disappeared.
So the vibe moved.
It slipped into private repos. Into throwaway scripts. Into quiet weekends and “nobody will ever see this” experiments. Not because devs stopped caring but because caring requires space.
The funny part? This industry always loops back. What gets squeezed out eventually becomes the thing everyone’s chasing again. Fun turns into “innovation.” Play turns into “creativity.” Vibe coding will come back with a new name and a shiny blog post.
Until then, you don’t have to wait for permission.
Protect a corner of your work where the rules don’t apply. Build things that won’t impress anyone. Learn in ways that don’t look productive. That’s not slacking that’s survival.
The vibe isn’t gone.
It’s just waiting for you to stop asking whether it’s allowed.
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