Looking for meaning in a world where I don’t have to learn anything, Part 1

I quit my job right before the AI boom to travel. I spent a whole year away from the corporate life, only scarcely following the news on tech, not fully appreciating how things were shaping up.

Once I started working again, the first phrase I got hit with was vibe coding.

When I run into something unknown my first instinct is to throw myself at it to decipher it. So I rolled up my sleeves and started looking into it. It didn’t take long to figure out that vibe coding is having an LLM write the code for you. Really? Is that it?, I thought. What am I missing?

I couldn’t believe that such a passionate (and opinionated) community as developers would let LLMs write the code, make architectural decisions and maybe even ship it all straight to production. I thought it was a phase.

Sigh… We forget it’s in our nature to take the easiest path. Quirk becomes novelty. Novelty becomes common. And some things that should not be forgotten are lost.

Now we find ourselves on the reverse swing of the pendulum. We write all the code, we design all the apps with AI but how do we make it good? Why does something that used to come so easily to us, like creating a usable interface, now elude us so? And where is the joy of building hiding? Is it gone forever or can we reignite the spark?

This is what I’m going to be writing about in this series. AI, how it affects my professional life and by extension my intellectual fulfillment.