When Vibe Coding Becomes Your Primary Dopamine Source
Recently stumbled on a thought from ThePrimeagen — former Netflix engineer and a fairly prominent tech blogger. The thought is simple but uncomfortably accurate: thanks to vibe coding, it's become too easy to make new things, and at some point this starts crowding out everything else.
I caught myself experiencing roughly the same thing.
It used to be that making a new product, a new site, or even a noticeable new feature was a story with a high barrier to entry. You had to gather yourself, carve out time, push through the routine, hit a wall somewhere. Now everything is different. If the idea is more or less clear, you can genuinely build something alive over a weekend. And over the next weekend — something else.
And that's the problem.
Not because it's bad. On the contrary. It feels good. It gives you dopamine. You're not just sitting there "studying something." You're creating. You get a result. Visible. Tangible. A new screen, a new feature, a new service, a new piece of product.
I feel this very well with VideoMind. I genuinely enjoy sitting on weekends and improving it. Adding new capabilities. Finishing what I've wanted to do for a long time. Watching an idea quickly turn into a working thing.
And here's the key point: it's not that I'm "burned out" or that I stopped enjoying it. No. I enjoy it. Too much.
The problem is different: it seems this has become too powerful a source of pleasure. So powerful that everything else starts losing the competition.
Mountains? Sure, that's nice, but there's no such quick result there.
Meetups, socializing, various external activities? Sure, that's important, but they don't give the same sense of progress.
Exercise? Necessary, but no longer perceived as the main source of joy.
And this, I think, is where the real substitution happens.
Development used to be work, and now it very easily turns into entertainment. Moreover, entertainment that looks socially approved and even useful. You're not wasting time. You're building a product. Learning. Pushing an idea forward. Making something real.
But in fact, it still starts taking the place of other things.
Not because you decided to give them up. But because your brain has already chosen where it's more interested.
And I don't see some beautiful takeaway here in the style of "you must stop immediately." I don't want to stop. I enjoy creating products. I enjoy this pace. I enjoy that now you can get from idea to result faster.
But it seems we need to at least honestly acknowledge one thing: vibe coding changed not just development speed. It changed the very distribution of pleasure in a developer's life.
The question is no longer just whether AI helps write code. It helps — that's obvious.
The question is different: what happens when building digital products becomes your strongest and most accessible dopamine source? It seems that's exactly what's happening to me right now. And possibly, this is the new reality for many of us.
This article was created in hybrid human + AI format. I set the direction and theses, AI helped with the text, I edited and verified. Responsibility for the content is mine.