At the beginning of the year, which now feels like a decade ago,
I conceded and picked up the agentic coding tools.
This was the end of a battle I had been waging against vibe coding since its inception.
I could no longer justify working for months on an idea when it could be done in hours, or at least that's what I thought.
Writing code had always been a part of my identity, my only differentiator in any room I walked into. And I loved that I could easily recognise other members of the tribe, and they could recognise me.
But at the same time, I knew what I had given up in order to be part of the tribe: the sleepless nights spent hopelessly chasing down bugs through Stack Overflow and GitHub issues; the questionably missing social life because of all the Fridays and weekends spent debugging prod; the endless, perpetual burnout after working on projects for weeks; and my deteriorating eyesight, which now required prescription glasses because I had been staring at screens for too long. So, of course, it was enticing.
But before I jumped in, I sent a post to all my fellow tribesmen asking if we were sure that what we did, some out of passion, some out of curiosity, some out of competitiveness, should now cost upwards of $1,200 a year, or $2,400 for some and $4,800 for others. That was the money we would previously have been saving up for a new Mac. There was no answer. No one else felt like they should take a stand or define what we were stepping into.
The reason I got into coding was the promise that you could build anything from scratch. You just needed the focus to do it, and all of these requirements were innate to you as an individual, and you only needed to push hard enough to get there. And for a long while, the tribe, made up of others with the same drive, supported this idea. You could write code on paper; you could write code with sticks on the ground; you could write code on your phone; you could write it on an old palmtop that was falling apart and lacked a charger; you could write it on an even older computer from the '90s whose fans sounded broken every time you turned it on, while continuing to hope it wouldn't give in.
I remember the first time I built and deployed a site end to end. I remember the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the launch, all the feelings about the possibilities that would open up when I got it done, all the bugs that brought me one step closer to understanding what I was doing, all the programming books pirated off Z-Library, all the console.logs I had to write, all the code I had to comment and uncomment, all the tutorials I had to fast-forward through looking for what I wanted, and all the docs sites I could hardly understand.
And meeting others who had the same dream of being able to create from scratch, where your mind was your only asset and the only thing that dictated a boundary, was empowering. You didn't even need to speak the same language (though you probably needed to write the same one), worship the same God, look the same, or even have the same ideologies. The process of becoming a programmer was enlightening enough that those who had gone through it instantly recognised their peers and had respect for each other.
[Those were the days](https://open.spotify.com/track/5Iy2Jj87Ha0C0IBlNE1I4y?si=411dd2cf7af3480d)
when playing Avicii on blast on wired earphones connected to a palmtop with a low battery felt better than any prompt ever written on a Mac with noise-cancelling AirPods.