The end of craft

07 Aug 2025

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I tried vibe coding for the first time. I gave Anthropic some money and got myself a pro subscription to Claude, and then I gave it a pretty tough problem to chew through–a Game Boy emulator.

While I haven’t ended up with a working emulator (yet), Claude wrote way more Game Boy emulator code than I ever have. It didn’t fully work, but a lot of things did work, and all without me touching a single line of code myself. This should be great! We’ve made coding ever faster! It was a lot of fun to see what Claude would come up with too. It was fun and exciting and I kind of hate everything about it.

To understand why I hated the experience, we have to talk about what programming is. Programming, to me, is a craft. It’s a skill that you create things with. It’s something you can work to get better at. It’s something you can talk to other people about. It’s something you can learn from other people. It’s a creative output.

Vibe coding strips away all of these very human things and just leaves a slot machine that creates business value. This just isn’t programming as I know it. For some people, that’s ok because the output is all that matters. I get where they’re coming from, but destroying such a fulfilling craft just so maybe some line goes up a little more is, to me, a tragedy.