Slow is smooth and smooth is fast

Tags: rants, AI
Date: 2025-05-25

One of the few upsides of living in a country made for old people is that we’re a bit slower to jump on trends and give up our traditions. In a way, we could say that our average level of neuroplasticity is so low that it prevents certain toxic tendencies, born from the pursuit of peak productivity, from influencing our culture. It’s like the ideal of “slow living” has shielded us from things like “meal prepping”, “speed reading” and “coffee to go”.

But the trend is clear, and we’re inevitably heading in that direction. We’ve lost the pleasure of doing things with care, and on the other side, we no longer expect care from others. What matters now is having everything, immediately, and as cheaply as possible. There’s no time left to cook ourselves a proper meal.

Vibe coding

"There’s a new kind of coding I call ‘vibe coding’, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. […] I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."

Andrej Karpathy

We’ve all fallen into this trap. After all, we’re hardwired to seek the easiest path to get what we want. So why spend entire days solving a problem that our beloved LLMs can fix in a few seconds? Sure, maybe it doesn’t work perfectly on the first try, and maybe the code it gives us is inefficient or unreadable, but we can always study it later and try to fix it, right?
Except… it works, so why bother? And so it goes, time after time, until the final result is a pile of garbage, completely incomprehensible and impossible to debug, because it’s not ours. We don’t own it, we don’t master it, we don’t know how to fix it. Sure, LLMs allowed us to finally complete that project we’d been delaying for months, and in record time. But because we outsourced so much of the process, we’re stuck with the outcome as it is. The AI worked for us, not with us. And now we depend on it.

It’s not just coding

Blaming it on the vague concept of “consumerism” would be too easy. The truth is, we’ve fully surrendered to the comfort of paying to get everything we want. At some point, we stopped caring about the products we use and started outsourcing. For every product that breaks, has a defect, or simply doesn’t suit our needs, we take the easy way out. If possible, we throw it away and replace it. If that’s too expensive, we hire someone else to fix it. As long as everything is fast and convenient.

Simply put, we don’t know how to do anything anymore. What would past generations think of us?
We don’t know how to sew, we can’t fix things in our own homes, we can’t grow a plant, we can’t repair our cars. Even daily tasks like cooking a basic meal from scratch have become a challenge for many.

We’ve lost our manual skills and our ability to figure things out on our own, relying instead on services and devices that make our lives easier but strip us of practical knowledge. Step by step, we become increasingly dependent on systems we don’t understand. If they disappeared, we’d be completely lost.

Sure, it might seem like we know how to use computers and tech. But do we really? Do we actually know how our computers are built? Do we understand the software we rely on every day? I think there’s a simple test: could we fix them? Could we adapt them to our needs?