February 28, 2026
Code, Vibe, and a Bit of Emptiness
The world keeps changing
One morning, Lee discovered that his fingers had become surprisingly quiet. They used to be like restless sparrows, pecking at the keys with fervor since dawn, turning a blank screen into steady rows of logical constructs. Lee loved that feeling: the resistance of the material, the dry click of the mechanical switches, and the faint scent of ozone from a warming system unit. He was a carpenter, hewing functions out of a raw mass of data.
But this Tuesday, as the sun began to peek awkwardly through his window, Lee sat motionless. There were no infinite lines before him - only a single blinking invitation to a dialogue.
He caught himself hesitating before typing a short phrase. It felt as if he had suddenly stepped in front of a vast, invisible orchestra. Lee was no longer laying bricks; he was preparing to wave a conductor’s baton.
“Be so kind,” Lee whispered, surprised by his own politeness, “as to rewrite this module so it doesn’t fall apart under the first sign of load.”
In that moment, something clicked in his mind. Psychologists call it the “intentional stance,” but to Lee, it felt like a strange shift in the weather inside his own head. He found himself attributing character, intent, and even a touch of moodiness to the shimmering void on the screen. He began to treat the algorithm like a colleague - perhaps one a bit more well-read than himself, but certainly one in need of gentle guidance.
His workflow, which once resembled a marathon, turned into a strange dance. First, Lee would stare into space for a long time, formulating an idea, then - with a short stroke of the pen (or, more accurately, a couple of sentences) - he would send it into the void and… wait.
The waiting was the most jarring part. In those seconds, Lee felt like a general who had dispatched a messenger with an order and now stood on a hill, peering into the gunpowder smoke of the battlefield. Formally, he remained in charge, but the sense of control was slowly slipping through his fingers like dry sand on a city beach.
Lee smiled at his reflection in the dark monitor. He was still in his favorite rumpled pajamas with the little ducks, but inside, a great maestro was beginning to square his shoulders. The only thing that troubled him in this morning silence was whether, over time, he might forget the smell of freshly planed code if all he had to do now was politely ask others to build the house for him.
Lee pressed the Enter key and the world froze for a moment. This wasn’t the living silence that precedes an epiphany, when a solution is about to leap from the tip of a pen. This was a technical pause - forty-five seconds that belonged not to him, but to silicon depths somewhere across the ocean.
Those forty-five seconds became “no man’s land” for Lee. It was too little time for deep reflection, yet too much for a mere blink. His brain, conditioned by years of instant feedback from a compiler, would fall into a mild stupor. At first, Lee tried to stare intently at the screen, maintaining that “thread of interaction,” but the thread was thin and snapped easily.
He would catch himself studying cracks on the windowsill or following the slow flight of a dust mote in a beam of light. In these moments, his attention - like a capricious child released from supervision - joyfully ran wild. He would recall the taste of yesterday’s tea, wonder why the clouds looked like whipped cream, and completely forget exactly what problem the returning code was supposed to solve.
When the screen finally hummed back to life, splashing a cascade of new lines onto Lee, the strangest part began. Lee no longer scrutinized every comma. His analytical mind, lulled by forty-five seconds of idleness, was too lazy to kick back into full gear.
“Well, looks good enough,” he’d mutter, his eyes skimming the monitor.
This was what his colleagues called “vibe coding” - a strange state where you evaluate work not by logic, but by a general feeling, the “vibe.” It seemed to Lee that he wasn’t seeing code, but its aura. If the text looked orderly and the agent replied confidently, Lee benevolently accepted the result. He had become like a tourist admiring the facade of a cathedral, utterly uninterested in how deep the pilings went or whether they had rotted from the damp.
There was something deeply ironic in this new rhythm. Lee felt incredibly busy because he was constantly “in dialogue,” but an emptiness was growing inside. His brain was gradually adjusting to these short dashes from one pause to the next, losing the capacity for the long, grueling, yet sweet immersion into the very heart of things.
He sat in his pajamas, surrounded by silence, waiting for the next answer, realizing that in those forty-five-second silences, he was slowly - drop by drop - ceasing to be the one who knew how it all actually worked. But the vibe was still good, and Lee, with a sigh, pressed Enter again.
By the middle of the week, Lee felt like a giant. Looking at the monitor, he saw not just text, but entire architectural ensembles that had risen from the void in a matter of hours. It felt as though he had acquired a superpower: he only had to hint, to barely graze a solution with a thought, and the agent would erect shimmering palaces of logic and functions before him.
Lee felt an incredible surge of energy. In his head, the numbers added up to a beautiful picture: he was certain he’d become at least twenty-five percent faster. It was a heady feeling - like running around a stadium and suddenly having jet engines ignite behind your back.
He looked at the freshly generated module with tenderness, feeling an almost parental love for it. Psychologists called this the “IKEA effect,” and it amused Lee. He remembered once assembling a bookshelf: he’d only driven a dozen screws into pre-drilled holes following someone else’s instructions, but when the shelf stood against the wall, Lee felt like a master cabinetmaker. It was the same here - he had merely written the “instructions” in the form of a prompt, and the agent had done all the grunt work, yet Lee was genuinely proud of the result as if he had hand-forged every symbol himself.
However, there was another, less shiny side to this coin.
Sometimes Lee caught himself in a strange contradiction. The sun would already be beginning to set, even though he was sure he’d barely had breakfast. He felt incredibly productive, but if someone were to ask him exactly what he had done all day, Lee would have to stop and think for a long time.
The trick was that his “superpower” was a bit deceptive. He spent minutes creating the code, but then hours slipped away fixing those “almost right” details. It was like trying to glue a broken vase back together: the pieces seemed to fit, but there was always a tiny gap through which water slowly seeped onto the floor.
Lee was trapped in a great paradox: his internal stopwatch showed record-breaking times, but the wall clock in the living room ruthlessly testified that he was moving slower than in the days when he wrote everything himself. He spent a vast amount of energy convincing himself of his own speed, while the “cognitive debt” - that gap between the perceived and the real - slowly grew, like a stack of unpaid bills on the edge of the desk.
He sat in his quiet room, surrounded by virtual castles, and suddenly thought that these castles might turn out to be cardboard sets if he ever decided to enter them without his all-knowing companion. But the vibe was still good, and Lee, brushing away a fleeting sadness, decided that one more “quick” module certainly wouldn’t hurt.
By the end of the month, Lee noticed that his world had become frighteningly quiet. The office used to resemble a disturbed beehive: someone would be furiously sketching diagrams on a whiteboard, others would argue until hoarse about architectural purity, and the air crackled with the living energy of collective creation. Now, his colleagues sat hunched over their monitors, only occasionally exchanging brief phrases. It seemed each of them had acquired an invisible, infinitely patient friend to whisper to in the digital void.
Lee realized he had also stopped reaching out to people. Why bother a neighbor when the agent answers faster and won’t grumble about stupid questions? But along with this convenience came a strange sense of alienation. The AI didn’t know how to empathize; it couldn’t share the joy of an elegant solution or laugh at a ridiculous mistake. Lee felt like the captain of a ship whose crew consisted of ghosts: the work got done, but there was no one to talk to.
The real test began when a flood of “foreign” code came crashing down on him. Thanks to the ease of generation, the volume of code reviews had grown 1.5x. Every morning, Lee opened dozens of new pages covered in perfectly uniform characters and felt a dull exhaustion rising within him. This was “reviewer fatigue.” His brain, overloaded by the endless checking of other “entities’” thoughts, began to give up. Lee increasingly caught himself “rubber-stamping” - simply nodding at the screen and hitting ‘approve’ because he no longer had the strength or desire to dive into those hundreds of lines.
But the saddest discovery was his own memory. One day, Lee tried to explain to himself how a small fragment of the system he’d assembled the day before actually worked. To his horror, he couldn’t. He looked at the code like text in a dead language: the letters were familiar, but the meaning escaped him.
His craftsmanship had become “brittle.” Lee realized that his internal neural connections responsible for deep understanding had, in a sense, gone into hibernation. The studies he’d read over evening tea spoke of a fifty percent drop in brain activity - and Lee felt it in every cell of his body.
He sat by the window, watching the twilight slowly swallow the city, thinking about how he’d become a hostage to his own comfort. His hand habitually reached for the keyboard to ask the agent another question, but Lee stopped. In the ringing silence of the office, he suddenly understood clearly: if things continued this way, he risked forever remaining only a shadow of the master he had once dreamed of becoming. Lee closed his laptop and stared at his palms for a long time, remembering what it felt like when the fingers themselves knew what to do.
On Sunday, Lee woke up because the sun touched his cheek a bit too unceremoniously. The house was quiet, except for the cat lazily stretching on the rug, utterly unconcerned with cognitive loads or architectural refinements. Lee looked at his hands for a long while - the same hands that once knew how to bring empty files to life without any outside hints.
He remembered an old parable about a man who became so used to riding in a carriage that, over time, he forgot how to walk. Lee didn’t want to be that man. He sat down at his desk, but this time he didn’t reach for the familiar AI agent icon. Instead, he opened a simple text editor - blank as a fresh canvas, and just as silent.
Lee decided to spend the day in “productive resistance.” He promised himself that today he would not make a single request, ask for no advice, and not allow the machine to finish a single line for him. It felt like returning to manual craftsmanship after years of working in an automated factory.
It was hard at first. His brain, accustomed to the “vibe” and quick answers, acted up like a spoiled child. Every few minutes, Lee caught himself wanting to hit the magic key combination and shift the complexity onto someone else’s shoulders. But he held firm. He learned again to feel the resistance of the material, to delve into the essence of every variable, to build logical bridges in his head that wouldn’t collapse from a stray breeze.
At one point, he thought of a “formula for fuss.” Lee didn’t write it down; he simply weighed it within himself. He realized that if the time spent explaining things to the agent, waiting for its response, and subsequently correcting its “hallucinations” exceeded the time of his own honest labor - then the magic had become a burden. And today, his personal tally was in favor of silence and clarity.
By evening, Lee felt a forgotten but pleasant exhaustion. It wasn’t that grey emptiness that slumped over him after endless reviews of generated code, but the pure joy of creation. He was an engineer of intent once again. He understood every “why” and every “how” in his small program.
Lee stepped out onto the balcony. The city below lived its hectic life, and somewhere there, in the depths of servers, billions of neurons continued to generate infinite lines. But here, in Lee’s small room, there was peace. He understood that AI is a wonderful companion for those who know the way, but it must never become the one who chooses the path.
Lee smiled. Tomorrow, he would return to his orchestra and take up the conductor’s baton once more. But now he knew for certain: if the music suddenly stopped, he could walk up to the instrument himself and play his part to the very end. Because in the end, people remain people - beings who seek meaning in every movement of their hands, even if those hands now mostly just touch the keys.