I Was "Vibe Coding" Before It Was Even A Thing - How It Led Me To Burn Out Doing My Passion

Photo by Gustavo Zambelli on Unsplash

(This article was originally posted for paid members on Medium.)

When I was 15, I discovered coding. 

I was placed into a generic “Programming 1010” class in high school, and learned Scratch. Before this, I never really knew what I wanted to do as an adult. Often, people would ask me the dreaded “So, what do you wanna do when you grow up?” and I would answer with something just to please them.

Oh, something with art maybe?

I don’t know. Maybe a nurse.

A teacher?

Nothing ever stuck with me. 

I was always a B average student in school. I did fine getting by, but I just didn’t have interests in the way that other people did. I grew up dealing with a pretty rough childhood, so I didn’t have time to discover what I really liked until I got older. My only hobbies at that point were listening to music and watching horror movies like the hormonal emo teenager I was (and playing Skyrim for 8 hours straight, of course).

But something clicked in my brain when I took that class. 

I remember going home towards the end of that semester and looking up coding tutorials on YouTube. Back then, trying to learn how to code was a lot different. We have so many different resources now that you arguably don’t even really need a degree to get a job in tech. But back then you were often forced to scrounge through hundreds of poorly edited videos before finding a semi-decent tutorial. I ended up on the CodeAcademy HTML course with nothing but a strong interest and some determination.

Fast forward a few years to me being 18. I have at least two and a half years of self-taught, mostly front-end (with the exception of my one true love, C#) programming under my belt. At this time, I’m planning on going to community college for a degree in computer science. I really didn’t care about computer science per se, but I wanted to do something in game development. This was, again, a time before you could get a degree in game development or design and not be laughed at like you’re some kind of wannabe pseudo-intellectual.

Around this time, I really began hearing plenty of horror stories about the game development industry in particular. The expectations to overwork, the actual abuse running rampant amongst triple-A studios. Not to mention, I was also a little intimidated just by being a “woman in STEM” (although now this does not deter me as much). I was usually one of the only girls in my classes. And really, this was all just one issue amongst the many that I was having around this time. I started college a whole two months before covid began, and honestly, didn’t make it very far before dropping out in defeat.

But I continued to code and teach myself new things.

At first I really enjoyed trying to be my own teacher. Things came to me relatively easy at that point. I had picked up my first full-time “big girl” job working at a restaurant, and liked the break that coding gave me. I also found a lot of solace in writing stories for the game development projects I was creating. I had always been a creative person, that was the one solid fact about me. 

But eventually I started becoming busy. I wanted so desperately to keep my momentum with the skills I was learning, but I was also becoming an adult with actual responsibilities (yuck). I moved out when I was freshly 19, with an abusive ex-partner who tore my confidence down to shreds. I started losing touch with my abilities, and whenever I would try to code or work on a project, I couldn’t think.

I started heavily relying on other people’s work.

This started innocently with me and the YouTube tutorials reuniting. But eventually I found myself in forums, copy and pasting outdated code until my projects were completely broken.

Then at some point, I just gave up.

I’m not kidding. I didn’t program anything for about 2 years straight. My computer broke, and I fell deep into a poor work-life balance with my real job. 

I was burnt out.

In the back of my mind, I kept asking “What if?”

What if I stayed in my college program?

What if I just started teaching myself stuff again?

What if I went back to college?

Then about two years ago, I bought a new computer to play video games. I ended up redownloading Unity, and reteaching myself C#. Somehow along the way, I discovered data-oriented programming and did go back to school and fell even harder in love with the world of computer programming.

Fast forward to now, I often reflect on the journey that I’ve taken. This is only a short reflection, a thought I jotted down on paper if you will, and I’ve omitted many details. But I can’t help but think about the recent “vibe coding” trend and compare my experiences to what’s happening now. 

I definitely lost a bit of myself and the way I think when I stopped relying on my own work and effort. And with the recent scare with AI and cognitive debt, I can’t help but wonder more about how it affects our learning capabilities. 

The future of AI is essentially inevitable. But is there something more we can be doing to control the loss of our logical thinking skills?

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