May 20, 2026
Ctrl-Alt-Drama
I Don't Vibe Code
Coder rejects the AI hype, and the comments instantly turn into a thrift-war
TLDR: A programmer says AI coding helpers never clicked for him, especially once they started charging money, and his old-school, penny-pinching rant struck a nerve. The comments split hard between “same, I only want help with boring chores” and “you used a trial once and declared the whole thing dead.”
One programmer dropped a spicy anti-hype essay saying, basically, “I don’t vibe code”—and the internet immediately made the comments section the real main event. His case wasn’t that artificial intelligence is useless forever, but that for him it never became essential: it helped with small annoying chores, then asked for a credit card, and that was apparently the final boss. The funniest detail? He comes from what he describes as a legendary family of cheapskates, including an ancestor who reportedly died trying to rescue abandoned cheese. Yes, the comments absolutely latched onto that energy.
A lot of readers were weirdly united on one point: the piece was very relatable. One commenter said it perfectly captured the narrow lane where these tools help—little tedious tasks—but argued the fun, difficult problem-solving is the whole reason they like coding in the first place. Others loved the writing even while disagreeing with the conclusion, basically saying, “wrong take, great post.” But the backlash arrived fast too. One critic accused the author of trying a free trial, running out of credits, and then acting like the entire future of software was canceled. Ouch.
Then came the bigger culture clash: frugal old-school builders versus the pay every month to think faster crowd. Another commenter romanticized the internet as a place where curious people could learn almost anything for free if they looked hard enough. And for pure chaos, one deadpan hot take stole the show: “programming is just procrastination that gets in the way of implementing your ideas.” That’s not a comment thread anymore—that’s a food fight with keyboards.
Key Points
- •The article explains why the author does not use AI-assisted "vibe coding" despite current enthusiasm around LLMs in software development.
- •The author says LLMs were useful for a limited set of simple but tedious tasks, including generating ImageMagick commands.
- •The author stopped using an AI coding tool after exhausting free credits and being prompted to pay for more tokens.
- •After ending that experiment, the author says they uninstalled the IDE, returned to Emacs, and did not miss the AI features.
- •The article connects the author’s view to long software development experience and to Fred Brooks’s writings on software complexity, including *The Mythical Man-Month* and “No Silver Bullet.”