The Weekly Commit #009: "Vibing"

You had an idea. You described it out loud, the way you’d explain something to a colleague over coffee. A few minutes later, it existed.

You didn’t build it. You imagined it, and something else did the building.

For those of us who write software, this is vibe coding. You describe what you want in plain English, an AI agent writes every line of code, and a small green light tells you it works. No syntax. No debugging. Just intention, and then a result.

And somewhere in the back of your mind, something stirs. Not alarm. Just a question:

Do I still need to understand this?

✳ How We Got Here

We’ve been here before. Just not quite like this.

Machine code. Assembly. C. Higher-level languages. Frameworks. Libraries. Each step was the same bargain: give up a little control, gain a little speed. And with every rung, a quiet relief — followed by a faint unease that you’d left something behind.

At every step, someone asked the same question. Does this mean we no longer need to understand what’s underneath?

The answer was always no. Just differently. The C programmer didn’t write assembly, but they understood memory. The Python developer didn’t write C, but they understood data structures. The abstraction protected them from complexity. Not from the need to think.

Then came natural language as interface. Then agents. Then vibe coding, where the interface is imagination and the agent does the rest. The stack has never been taller. The distance from thought to working software has never been shorter.

And the question has never been more honestly difficult.

⚠ We Do This In Life Too

Abstractions don’t live only in terminals.

The commute becomes muscle memory so the mind can be somewhere else. The relationship settles into routine so the heart doesn’t have to keep choosing. The career finds a groove, and gradually the groove does the navigating.

This is not failure. It’s how we manage complexity. The abstractions are protection.

But when we vibe through enough of life, we stop noticing what’s underneath. We stop asking why the morning feels heavy, why a conversation left something unresolved, why a particular piece of work lights us up when most doesn’t.

And one day something breaks, and we have no idea where to begin.

🧭 Ship vs Grow

I’m not arguing against vibe coding. The leverage is real. The ability to think at the level of intention rather than implementation is one of the most remarkable things that has happened to this craft.

But there are two ways to use an abstraction. You can ship with it, or you can grow with it. Both are valid. Only one compounds.

The engineers who grow are the ones who stay curious inside the gift. Not curious about everything. Just about this. The thing that just worked. Why did it do that? What did it understand that I hadn’t said?

That question is what separates someone who shipped from someone who grew. It turns a tool into a teacher. It makes the work feel less like output and more like progress.

You don’t need to read every line. You just need to stay in the conversation with what you’re building.

📌 The Commit

The terminal is still scrolling. The app still works.

This time, you scroll back up. You find one function. You read it slowly, not for speed but for meaning.

You don’t understand all of it. But you understand more than you did.

That’s the practice.

The abstraction protects you from complexity. It doesn’t protect you from ignorance.