Vibe-coding, low-code, medium-code... it's all good, and it's all a lot of fun
Apr 2025
I picked up a coding project today that I hadn't touched in about a year, and I was completely blown away. Quickly, using modern tools, I could rebuild my personal context to get back to productivity in minutes.
You see, in the old days, I would have dreaded this exercise — I would have had to remember dozens of little decisions I made, so many miscellaneous details that don't really matter to the final product, but stand in the way between you and what's interesting.
But today I just asked my coding agent, "Hey, how do I build and deploy this thing?" It took about 10 seconds to figure it out and let me know.
I immediately got started with a small feature. I told the agent the basic idea and it came back with an implementation. I zhuzhed it up by hand afterwards, but all the initial choices were fairly reasonable.
That's the trick, really. Most choices you make in a codebase are just fairly reasonable. The bits that I want to have fun with, I can still do. The coding agent lives inside an IDE, so I can put my hands back on the the controls whenever I decide. Some people call what I'm doing "vibe coding," but I don't think that's it... There's too much precision for it to be based couched as "vibes"; it's closer to various degrees of self-driving car.
When I'm dictating commands and letting agent mode run, it's very similar to being in the back of a Waymo. I can see the map, the lidar scans, and the steering wheel making adjustments. When I'm in chat mode and validating every move, it feels like enhanced cruise control. I'm setting the target speed and telling it to switch lanes, but it's handling all of the execution.
During the trickiest moments, or even the moments that are most fun, I'm fully hands-on and in control of the details, with a bit of auto-complete assistance if I want it. It's all quite natural and smooth. There's just never been as enjoyable, or as productive a time to be a coder as today.
© Nan Yu – 2025