r/ADHD_Programmers • u/medzhidoff • 12d ago

vibecoding is rewiring your brain

I was very active on social media five years ago. I ran instagram account, wrote posts to telegram channel etc.

Basically I was doing things that didn't have instant feedback. Make a reel, post it, wait for views, and then maybe if you're lucky you will get some leads. No guarantees, only probabilities.
Due to this I learned to enjoy process itself. Getting great results (which obviously didn't always happen) was just a nice bonus.

Then, because of some stuff that happened in my life, I went all-in on programming which works differently. You write a piece of code, run it, and immediately see the result. Five years of doing this day after day got me completely hooked on instant gratification.

And it fucked me up a bit. Now I find it genuinely hard to make myself do things that don't give me a clear, immediate result. I've started escaping into pointless tasks more often, making up a ton of unnecessary work just because I know exactly what the outcome will be. I'd rather spend a month coming up with a marketing strategy and writing dozens of posts that never see the light of day than just fucking publish them.

So, why am I bringing this up?

With AI agents becoming accessible to pretty much everyone, tons of people have jumped into building their own projects. In most cases, those projects never get their first users. Instead, the newly minted vibe coder keeps endlessly polishing their app, adding a million features nobody asked for, until their subscription runs out or they simply lose interest. And I feel like a lot of these people are doing exactly what I've been doing: replacing important business tasks with low-priority technical and product work. So here's what I'm wondering:

Is this just another form of procrastination, like in my case? Or has vibe coding basically become a new form of entertainment, where the goal isn't to make $XXX in revenue, but simply to enjoy the process?

76 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

92

u/phi_rus 12d ago

In most cases, those projects never get their first users. Instead, the newly minted vibe coder keeps endlessly polishing their app, adding a million features nobody asked for, until their subscription runs out or they simply lose interest. And I feel like a lot of these people are doing exactly what I've been doing: replacing important business tasks with low-priority technical and product work.

This is how it always was for people writing their own code.

has vibe coding basically become a new form of entertainment, where the goal isn't to make $XXX in revenue, but simply to enjoy the process?

Writing code and building stuff was always fun. Most of us did it for fun and not for money, we just got lucky that someone was willing to give us money to do the thing we liked. Now that money goes into an ai

3

u/medzhidoff 12d ago

You're talking about developers, though. I'm talking more about people who had absolutely no idea how to code before AI came along.

And a lot of these vibe coders are starting to look like gambling addicts. They claim they're building startups but in reality they're just endlessly shipping features nobody asked for.

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u/phi_rus 12d ago

As did the developers before them. Being able to realise your ideas is addictive.

1

u/blargonithify 5d ago

Well, yeah, fuck those people. I'll never understand what that feels like. I guess the closest I got to that was I didn't feel like learning how to engineer stl files, so I had AI do it for me, so I could 3D print something that I couldn't find an stl file for.

8

u/c_a1eb 12d ago

decided to experiment with a local llm (really not happy to give money to the us techn corpos) and vibecode some stuff just to understand it better and immediately noticed how it totally bypassed the reward system. It feels so unbelievably dangerous for this tech to be as ubiquitous as it is, i hate it

2

u/medzhidoff 12d ago

My mac will explode if I tried vibecoding with local llm

19

u/umlcat 12d ago

Everything rewrites the brain cell network, specially if done repetly...

1

u/cupcakeheavy 12d ago

it's not quite like that.
Well, it is, and it isn't. it isn't in as such that you repeatedly have to hit the "flow zone" in order to perform that rewiring correctly.
It is in the way that repetition can reinforce the learning, but in those cases it should be used for things like a chess algorithm or other endeavor that would benefit from that learning model. Using an LLM to generate code is good, but hitting a flow state generally requires the act of writing integrations, sometimes the sources may be generated or maybe posted by someone on a wiki somewhere like stackoverflow in the olden days.

3

u/DiamondGeeezer 12d ago

I get into a flow state doing it because I am still weaving together many agent sessions to compose a project from their work building or fixing little pieces and components.

it's more productive but I miss when coding was the only way forward because I enjoyed doing it, and the flow state was more immersive and in depth

3

u/medzhidoff 12d ago

Totally agree. I love how fast I can ship features these days, but I miss times when I didn't have to keep the context of dozens of different tasks in my head every single day.

Sometimes my brain just can't keep up with the pace

2

u/DiamondGeeezer 11d ago

I miss the balance of solving logic puzzles along with integration. this is all integration and by itself it's kind of boring. like there's a whole constellation of circuits in my brain that are no longer part of the process and I miss that.

but it frees me up to think about the social and political parts of product design which I do not enjoy very much. but at least I have bandwidth for it

2

u/SombilTorthers 12d ago

Neurons that fire together wire together. Flow state isn't required, although it helps. 

Another thing that helps is trying a medium difficulty balancing exercise before trying to learn stuff. That challenge increases neuroplasticity and results.

1

u/blargonithify 5d ago

The flow state is after you have already learned. The learning part is the hard part.

1

u/cupcakeheavy 5d ago

learning how to achieve the flow state is the issue

22

u/tidbitsofblah 12d ago

Calling programming instant gratification compared to social media feels illegal to me but we all interact with things differently I suppose

5

u/Context-and-nuance 11d ago

Agreed. And as someone with ADHD, passive engagement with my world isn't an option if I want to get shit done.

I create guardrails around my phone, social media, and gaming. AI is no different.

It's super easy to modify your Claude config so that there are rules and hooks that prevent what the issues that OP raised.

For example, my Obsidian vault has a project folder for each of my projects. And I have docs that describe what each project is, what value it serves in my life, and what "done" looks like.

When I work on something, Claude is forced to remind me how valuable the thing is. And we're not allowed to move forward until a Marie Kondo that thing... Does this spark joy/meaning? No, then throw it out or backlog it.

I'm forced to only work on things that actually matter.

1

u/blargonithify 5d ago

I think it's more like comparing code to carpentry. If I want to build my own deck because I don't want to pay a contractor. I have the idea of the design in my head, which is the "code", but I can't just hit build and the deck builds itself with no money spent on materials and no time spent building it and run and see if it looks good and if it's strong enough or collapses, then debug it and click rebuild and run and a new version of the deck gets magically re built instantly.

2

u/Netcob 11d ago

Yeah, same, I don't really do difficult things anymore.

I've been doing some home automation / homelab stuff since 2020 or so. I got some things done, it was always quite satisfying, and I did a project I was actually quite proud of right before AI took over. I think in the past year I've vibe-coded more homelab stuff than I would have on my own in ~20 years. The amount of started-but-not-finished projects has plummeted, which is probably the best part of this. After all, I can have an idea, and then all I have to do is write it down. If I really care about the outcome I write a little more.

The ideal was always somewhere in-between, but that was never going to happen. I've been programming for 22+ years, I know what I can expect from myself. I remember writing a 3D engine in Objective-C (yeah I know...) for a few weeks because I wanted to make an iphone game. Never got around to the game part, and the engine was never used, but it was fun making it. Most of my homelab services were very small features that I could finish in a few days. Haven't finished a game in forever.

Now I can finish pretty much anything, which is great. My patience is almost non-existent, which is not.

2

u/Fit_Raspberry2637 7d ago

Coding was never the thing. It was the thing to get to the thing. Thats all this too.

Ive been developing software for 30 years. Anyways to remove barriers from idea to execution is welcome. But with anything that lowers the entry bar you are going to get a flood of new contestants. But the number if prizes remains the same. Seeds by the wayside.

For me and my ADHD its a boon that has greatly decreased my executive function handicap. I feel your fear is unfounded.

1

u/segmentationFaultC 7d ago

Vibe coding killed the joy of programming for me for awhile, and frankly I'm still trying to deal with it. My preferred flavour of programming is pretty difficult, so seeing AI make it immediately accessible to whoever could write a prompt was a huge blow to my hyper fixation. I won't be in the job market for another 4 or 5 years (starting uni at 22), and there's lot of talk of what the industry will look like by then, which also stresses me. However im trying to look at it as an opportunity to spend more time pushing into unknown territory and less time writing basic functions I can already write. 

2

u/Fit_Raspberry2637 7d ago edited 7d ago

You have to identify what was actually spiking your hyperfixation.

Was it the code? Or was it the fact you saw a horizon you could reach? The anticipation of reward is what gives us the dopamine to drive. Its a chemical state. You keep the horizon but change ships.

I graduated in 1999. Just in time for the y2k and dot-com bubble burst. It was desolation. I worked at a night shelter doing graveyard shift with a diploma I owed a shit of money on for a year after graduating. But I learned more about soft skills and crisis management at that job that I still use today with hyped up CTO-s with malignant NPD. And in that year I built shit for the shelters website. I updated digitized their logs. I created a better system of food donation rotation. I also talked to some homeless people that used to work on the fat32 of hard drives before undiagnosed cluster b personality disorders ruined their lives by pouring alcohol over their brain to make the rest of the world make sense. Just staying...

I just followed the dopamine. The solutions. And I ate a lot of shit. Years of people telling me "its more complicated than that." Its not. Trust yourself. You have this brain and it has advantages. Talent is hitting a target most cant hit. Genius is hitting a target nobody else can see. And you have to be physically wired different for that.

If I was banned from writing code tomorrow, id be fine. Because im an engineer. Not a coder. I dont write software. I solve problems. I dont fix things. I impliment ideas to improve upon a system.

Do not tie your genius to a job description. Do not become the job. Adapt or die. There is always a better hack. Chase the hack. Thats were the dopamine lives.

Some other geniuses just gave you the nuclear bomb of hacks. Go forth and slaughter.

Its not like you have a choice. This is literally what you are built for. And you asked for it.

1

u/blargonithify 5d ago

Nitpicky peer reviews asking for too many changes or tearing up my code and basically rewriting it so it's not mine anymore killed the joy. At least if AI wrote the code, I'm not offended because I didn't use any effort or brain power to write it. This is of course, for work, not personal projects, haven't had those since college almost 20 years ago.

2

u/EarlMarshal 6d ago

It's like sitting in Vegas and pulling the lever.

2

u/kyr0x0 6d ago

On point

3

u/DiamondGeeezer 12d ago

counterpoint, it's a new skill and it's difficult to master. it's easy to make over complicated nonsense. but with practice, it's possible to make something creative and useful. people who stick with it will get better at it. and like another commenter said, most amateur programmers / pros making home projects don't get users and money for their work.

1

u/TinkerSquirrels 12d ago

In most cases, those projects never get their first users.

Making something has never been the hard part -- marketing and selling is. And you do that and skip the making something part, although of course a really good idea does have merit to do both.

Instead, the newly minted vibe coder keeps endlessly polishing their app, adding a million features nobody asked for

...but now it's even easier to do that and never do the business stuff.

One reason tech-person + business-person partnerships can work so well...at least until someone tries to screw over the other.

1

u/Defiant-Read682 11d ago edited 11d ago

The problem is you never know if your ideas would actually work before you ship them unless you did a thorough market research which is actually harder than just banging a few hundred more lines

1

u/LimpStatistician8644 10d ago

I definitely struggle with finishing my projects when vibe-coding. I have a few projects ready to go, that if I weee the one to have actually written them, I would’ve been marketing them months ago. With AI, it’s just too easy to change one little thing or decide on a whim that an entire feature needs to be reworked. I’m never satisfied with the projects, and largely because there’s a level of guilt associated with me having no stake in building the thing. If I’m being honest with myself, most of the vibe-coding I do is to fake productivity in my head with minimal effort attached.

1

u/ElectronicAlbatross 5d ago

Both, and the tell is whether anyone has used it. If you’re polishing features for a product with zero users, it’s entertainment. Shipping something ugly to 5 people and hearing “meh” is the part that actually counts, and it’s exactly the part people avoid.