# I Paused Vibecoding for a Month

## How I Stopped

Over the past few months, I had been using vibecoding almost obsessively. The term has become common enough by now: using AI to quickly build products, sometimes taking an idea from scratch to launch in just a few days, or even a few hours. I enjoyed that pace. I could have an idea at midnight, start coding the next day, and publish it over the weekend.

During that period I built two apps and a client somewhat like a combination of Lobehub and local Claude Code. The number was not huge, but the last one gave me the strongest sense of frustration.

After I built the client, I did not even like using it myself. That was ironic. I spent a lot of time making it, only to realize that the use case was not something I actually wanted. At first I thought the problem was the tool. Later I realized the problem was the problem itself: I did not truly need this tool. I just wanted to build it.

## Where the Problem Was

I thought about it for a long time, and the problem probably came from two places.

First, I was moving too fast. As soon as an idea appeared, I immediately started building. I spent less and less time thinking about "what value does this product actually have" and "what should it look like." My execution was strong, but the depth of thinking was declining. The result was that many things I built lacked a soul. They worked, but they were not memorable.

Second, I started feeling anxious on days when I did not vibecode. It felt as if the day had been wasted if I had not written something or deployed something. This anxiety is subtle and easy to miss, but it was there. Life did not become happier because I had more products. Instead, it gained an invisible pressure.

I remember one night when I originally wanted to go home and play a game, but my mind kept repeating, "I did nothing today." So I opened my computer and wrote a meaningless feature just to feel a little more at ease. That was not right.

## So I Stopped for a Month

I decided to pause vibecoding and spend time on other things: games, guitar, and doing nothing.

That month I played *Persona*, a JRPG I had never had time to touch before. I only played for a few days, but it was genuinely fun. JRPGs move slowly. They require time for dialogue, exploration, and growth. That is the opposite rhythm of vibecoding. Vibecoding pursues speed; JRPGs require slowness.

I also spent more time on guitar. I have been taking guitar lessons, but I usually did not practice much after class. Recently the lessons happened to cover transcribing songs, so I put more effort into that: getting familiar with chord progressions, the fretboard, and chord usage.

When I could hear whether a song used a Canon progression or a 1645 progression, reading guitar tabs felt different. I was no longer memorizing isolated chords, but understanding the structure of a song. It gave me a new perspective. Music is built this way. Seemingly complex chord progressions are often variations of a few basic patterns.

That feeling was wonderful. It was like writing code: no longer copying and pasting someone else's code, but understanding the logic behind it.

## Rethinking Vibecoding

This period gave my life some breathing room. Days without wrestling with AI were actually pretty good.

I started rethinking vibecoding. There is nothing wrong with it. The ability to quickly turn ideas into reality is valuable. The problem may have been how I used it.

I had turned vibecoding into a goal instead of a means. I was building products for the sake of building products, not to solve a real problem. That is dangerous, because you never know when the next product will "succeed," so you keep building and cannot stop.

Maybe I should reverse the order: first find a real problem worth solving, then think about the best solution, and only then decide whether vibecoding is the right way to implement it. Not the other way around: have an idea, start writing immediately, and look for users after it is done.

This month-long pause taught me two things. First, life should not contain only one thing. When all your time goes into a single pursuit, you may lose your sense of other possibilities. Second, stopping is not scary. You do not lose all your abilities just because you paused for a month. You may see more clearly because you stopped.

## Next

Of course I have not given up vibecoding. I just want to recover that pure enthusiasm: doing it because I want to, not because I am anxious. Opening the computer not because of the guilt of "doing nothing today," but because "this problem really needs to be solved."

Maybe next time I start a new project, I will spend a few more days thinking about its value and shape instead of opening the IDE immediately. Maybe I will spend a week doing user research instead of imagining what users need out of thin air. Maybe I will write the idea down first and look at it again a few days later to see whether it still matters.

These are all maybes. I may still impulsively start the next project. But at least I am now aware of the problem, and that already counts as progress.

I had a good month, and my guitar improved a little too. For me, that is enough.