On botsitting

For the past few months I have been pretty heavy on vibecoding, mainly on a React frontend, which I have never done before. I would like to recount my experience about it.

botsitting

The usual “workflow” for a vibe coder would be something like this:

• Write a prompt
• While waiting for the thing to write, go launch another coding agent, or hop on Twitter.
• Returns, check, run compile, if it works, check into git, if not, ask the agent to try again
• Repeat

I would say that the feeling of vibecoding when I’m lacking sleep is somewhere between addiction and mania. There would be a long period of unengagement, and then the burst of everything the AI output all at once. I am gambling of 2-3 minutes at a time, for a 2-3 line edit that may or may not work. It was not fun. Sometimes the agent does not work well, so I would have to watch it deep into the night. Some days I would fall asleep with the laptop open.

Letting the AI run overnight is not very good either, because sometimes the connection would just break and hamper.

productivity

Admittedly, using vibecoding is the only way to make changes to an already dense AI codebase. And it would be fine for a couple of big migrations, such as uniting all design elements into a single global file. My work was done on the UI (which I have not done before, but I like web design), so any change has an immediate and visible effect. I am not sure that it would be as effective were it any other domain.

Through the days I developed some personal skills to read code quickly, and for that I appreciate. But overall I think it does make me disconnect from the “work”. How I would describe it is a hazy understanding, where it’s not clear I understand what is going on. I would be able to make changes, but only after asking AI to explain the project structure first.

I suppose that kind of understanding of code can only be done when one has been on the same context for a long time, say at least half a year.

so what now?

Going without AI on the code after using it, I did feel helpless and very impatient. That is dependence. And I am very conflicted — should I go all in? or claw my way back? There’s only time for one. And while it is a bad feeling, if everyone is encouraging it, does it really matter? Maybe people’s skill will atrophy to a disaster, maybe we will just adapt to it, for better or worse. And if one day the AI is taken away, maybe people would just shift back and say they were wary all along. It is pretty easy to forge your track record.