A little backstory: I’m a software engineer who’s been doing this for years and honestly, coding has always seemed a bit like magic to me. You just write down some letters and numbers to a file, run some commands in the terminal, and the computer will just do whatever you want. It’s insane!
The interesting thing, though, is writing software used to be sooo slow. At least for me. And don’t get me wrong, there was joy in that too. Building and creating something tangible, especially something that you yourself love, is immensely satisfying and good for the soul. But you had to be very.. what’s the word, intentional? Maybe deliberate is the word. You had to be very deliberate about what you built because getting something tangible took days, a full weekend, weeks.
But now, we are unbounded! Think about that. The bottleneck now isn’t writing the code, or coming up with a good UI/UX, it’s our imagination that’s the bottleneck (jesus, did I really just say that?). But seriously, now we’re in a phase where validating an idea doesn’t take days.. it takes minutes. MINUTES. You don’t have to spend hours deciding what to build, you just build and build and build and see what feels good.
And that brings me to the most joyous part of all. Completely personalized software. What do I mean by that? Not software that’s designed for the masses that you may resonate with. You can build software specifically for yourself. And fast! This is the part that blows my mind. Always wanted a money tracking app but wary of giving access to your bank accounts and financial data to some mystery company. Build it for yourself. Wouldn’t it be cool if it had that feature that only you would like? Now it can.
There is so much emphasis on building things that are commercially viable. Honestly, being in software I really enjoy that too, but there is this whole new world of exploration and joy to be found with building things just for you. To me that’s not like magic, that is magic. That’s why I vibe code.