“Are you f***** vibe coding right now?”

[Record scratch] Yep that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got here.

The short version is: a combination of grift-fueled anxiety and genuine interest sent me down a vibe coding rabbit hole that reminded me why I never became a developer in the first place. (Spoiler alert: I don’t like it, and I’m not good at it.)

The longer version: like a lot of elder millennials in tech, I once occupied myself with grand ideas of building a social app. I had a name for it! (“Y’all Free?”!) I bought a domain for it! (https://yallfree.com). And that’s about as far as I got. I had stuff to do, and building an app was hard!

And then, suddenly… maybe building an app wasn’t so hard? After my 20th panic attack spurred by a LinkedIn post about how I was careening towards the permanent underclass, I decided this would be a great opportunity to dip my toe into the sparkly waters of “vibe coding” (ie, coding for non-coders [ie, developer cosplay]). So I fired up Claude Code and started prompting.

The first thing that struck me, honestly, was how familiar it felt. Setting up accounts on hosting platforms, running into administrative snags and cross-platform dependencies, poking and prodding until something kinda works. It felt a lot like what learning to code felt like in 2004, and in 2012, and in 2017.

But then… something shifted. For lack of a less obnoxious description, I locked in. It started feeling less like work and more like a game. Tippy-tap on the keyboard, out comes a new feature!! 😄 Try the feature, the feature doesn’t work!! 🙁 Tippy-tap on the keyboard and then it works a little better!! 😃 Rinse and repeat forever and ever.

Dear reader, it tickled my brain in the most delightful of ways. All I wanted to do was vibe code! I vibe coded at the airport. I vibe coded at breakfast. I vibe coded at a beautiful Tuscan villa until my girlfriend asked me incredulously if I was vibe coding at a beautiful Tuscan villa.

I vibe coded until… the vibes went bad.

I was cranky. I wasn’t sleeping well. My brain was going zippety zap all the time but not really getting anywhere. A recent HBR article called it “AI brain fry”, and that’s pretty much what it felt like.

The funny(?) thing is that I didn’t stop vibe coding because it was ruining my sleep and putting stress on my relationship. I stopped vibe coding because, at a certain point, I ran up against another familiar feeling: I don’t really like coding very much, and I’m probably not very good at it. It’s why I stopped coding in 2024, and in 2012, and in 2017. And in 2026. (Though when I am fully de-fried, I think there’s a good chance I’ll keep building my silly little app at a healthier pace. It’s nice to have silly little projects!)

There are some product manager-y takeaways to share here about wHaT mY dEsCeNt iNtO AI BrAin FrY tAugHt me AbOut B2B SaaS but… for now, I just wanted to share this experience in its unpolished state. It feels good to share experiences directly without having my words or thoughts mediated by an engagement-optimization machine. Different-good. Good-good.

I just wrapped up a really fun client project and I’ve got some availability coming up for workshops, speaking, consulting and team coaching! Reach out and let’s figure out something fun we can do together.

I could write a whole newsletter about R.E.M. opinions, but as the sun comes out and I try to conjure some springtime swagger I find myself spending a lot of time with the 1994-1995 live recordings on the expanded Monster reissue.

Thanks so much for taking an interest in my work. As always, you can reach me directly at [email protected].