Inspiration Sold Separately

The first time AI builds something for you, it feels like cheating. You describe a thing, it writes the code, your app appears on the screen. You never struggle with the syntax. You don’t battle how to organize the code. What you had in your head is now on the screen.

If making things is solved, all that’s left is deciding what to make. Sounds empowering without all that learning in the way. But the struggle we’re skipping may be the same struggle that taught us what was worth making.

The problem is that those annoying little activities—wrestling with the blank page, reworking the code in your IDE for the tenth time, staring at the thing until it starts to make sense—were the education. They made you better at seeing the problem.

Writing code sucks until you become fluent in it. Not everyone feels this way. But I did. Most things worth doing are like this. Nobody picks up a guitar wanting to struggle through “Hot Cross Buns.” They go to bed dreaming of the day they can play “Stairway to Heaven” from memory. The ambitious ones dream of writing their own. But until that day, you struggle. You practice. The thing starts to come together. One day you don’t have to look up every chord. The next, you can turn them into familiar riffs. At some point, playing isn’t the thing holding you back anymore.

This is what pure vibe coders often miss. Those first lines of code were hard for us too. We kept going because the reward came later. You can’t judge a craft by how it feels in the first few days. Eventually, writing code stops being the hard part. Then you learn a new language and get humbled all over again. Even that gets easier with experience.

Once you develop fluency, the fun part begins. You can make what you see in your head. So I get why people love vibe coding. They get to skip the hard part and jump straight to the thing they imagined. The first time it works, you understand the feeling a programmer gets when they first see “hello, world” appear on the screen. And sure, some coders are probably bitter that nobody has to suffer the indignity of playing “Hot Cross Buns” a hundred times anymore. But with enough practice, code stops being in your way. It becomes something you can use from memory. AI makes that faster. But it can’t manufacture earned inspiration.

After enough time with AI, I can see that writing the code served another purpose. It slowed us down. We spent more time sitting with the problem, testing what we were building, and using it as it took shape. Planning, building, testing, and refining kept our hands on the strings. When we solved problems we had not lived ourselves, that work showed us where the pain lived. The best engineers I knew got better at caring about that experience as they built. The worst ones got lost in the code and forgot the person using it.

This will be true for vibe coders too. Many are solving problems they know well. They have a job, a problem they wish they had the time or money to fix, and now they can. That is great. If you have years of experience in another field, AI can give you leverage you did not have before. But you can’t experience problems through AI alone. If you’re new to the workforce, or if you make your living like I do helping other people solve problems with software, the work used to put you closer to the pain.

I spent more than a decade writing code for other people. Before that, I worked a lot of different jobs in a lot of different industries. I grew up in a world where friction was not optional. Those things showed me problems worth solving. Learning the tools taught me how to solve them.

Slowing down gave us time to think, observe, and refine. It gave us time to sit with the same riff, playing it over and over, slowing it down, speeding it up, then slowing it down again, listening for what came next. The challenge now isn’t whether it’s necessary to code. It’s how you make room for unproductive waiting in a world that wants you racing forward.