Long before “vibe coding” there was already a kind of programmer who refused to repeat meaningless work and transformed manual effort into architecture.
There is an old lineage in programming that never received the respect it deserved.
Long before people started calling everything vibe coding, there was already the Lazy Programmer.
Not the irresponsible one.
Not the careless one.
Not the person who ships garbage and disappears.
The real Lazy Programmer is something else entirely.
It is the person who feels genuine discomfort in the face of repetitive work.
The one who looks at a manual process and sees a system failure.
The one who refuses to click fifty times, copy and paste identical blocks, repeat idiotic commands, or fix for the tenth time a predictable mistake that should have been eliminated at the source.
People called it laziness.
But most of the time, it was vision.
The right kind of laziness
The Lazy Programmer does not want to escape effort.
He wants to escape waste.
There is a brutal difference between those two things.
He does not avoid important work.
He avoids mechanical, mindless, ritualistic work unworthy of a minimally functional human brain.
If a task will be repeated two, three, or ten times, it is already on the radar.
If it depends on human attention in order not to fail, it is badly designed.
If an entire team performs an operational ritual as if it were sacred tradition, then it is probably only missing someone courageous enough to eliminate it.
The Lazy Programmer is that person.
I never had a problem with difficult work; my problem was always with stupid work.
Before the hype, the intention already existed
Today there is an entire aesthetic around prompting, describing, generating, automating, and orchestrating.
All of this seems new because it gained beautiful interfaces, hype, and marketable names.
But the soul of the idea is ancient.
The Lazy Programmer already lived by this logic long ago:
do not do manually what can become a script,
do not repeat by hand what can become a template,
do not depend on human memory where a contract can exist,
do not rely on discipline where a system can exist.
In other words: he was already practicing intent-driven programming, even when that intention still had to be assembled through shell scripts, aliases, generators, macros, cron jobs, linters, scaffolds, pipelines, code generation, CI, CLIs, and every glorious hack imaginable to reduce human involvement in stupid work.
Before there was a fancy name for it, I already wanted to describe intent and let the machine carry the rest.
The mistake outsiders make
People looking from the outside think the Lazy Programmer wants to do less.
Wrong.
He wants to do less of the wrong part.
He wants to shift effort away from repetitive execution and toward modeling the solution.
He wants to spend energy designing once the mechanism that will prevent a hundred future manual executions.
He wants to pay the cognitive cost at the source in order to harvest operational relief at scale.
He does not hate building.
He hates rebuilding the same brick corridor every day because nobody had the decency to invent a conveyor belt.
People called laziness what was often simply the inability to see systems.
It was never about working less; it was always about using the brain where it actually creates the most value.
Lazy, but senior
People from this school are practically senior vibe coders.
But with scars.
Because they already learned, the hard way, truths that pure enthusiasm is only now beginning to discover.
Automating a bad process only creates disaster at scale.
Generating code quickly does not mean reducing complexity.
Tools without validation become illusion-producing machines.
Bad abstractions do not save work; they outsource confusion to the future.
And the greatest sign of maturity is not producing a lot of code.
It is eliminating the need for code, decisions, and effort where they should never have existed in the first place.
The Lazy Programmer is not impressed by speed alone.
He wants leverage.
He wants recurring gains.
He wants structural reduction of friction.
For me, seniority was never about enduring more repetition — it was about learning how to eliminate it.
Your commitment is not to effort. It is to operational elegance.
There is a hidden ethic inside this mindset.
The Lazy Programmer respects his own time because he respects the time of others.
He knows that every badly designed manual procedure is an invisible tax imposed on the entire team.
Every repetition that could have been automated is a form of operational debt.
Every process that depends on constant artisanal care is already warning that it will fail at scale.
That is why he does not want to become the support hero.
He does not want to be the brilliant operator saving the night shift.
He does not want applause for enduring the chaos.
He wants to build a system in which that heroic theater becomes unnecessary.
I do not want to be the hero of the operation; I want to make heroism unnecessary.
The real motto
It was never “work less.”
It was always:
never work twice on the same problem.
Solve it once.
Encapsulate it.
Standardize it.
Automate it.
Validate it.
Make it reproducible.
Reduce the space for error.
Eliminate dependency on memory, luck, and goodwill.
This is the highest form of laziness: the kind that transforms raw effort into structure.
If I had to do it twice, the system is still incomplete.
The secret history of computing is the history of this laziness
Aliases came from this.
Scripts came from this.
Makefiles came from this.
Pipelines came from this.
Infrastructure as code came from this.
Scaffolding came from this.
Autocomplete came from this.
Code generation came from this.
Agents come from this.
Behind much of the practical evolution of software lies the same ancestral question:
how do we guarantee that nobody ever needs to do this manually again?
That question drove more real progress than many strategic meetings with pretty slides ever did.
It was precisely from this discomfort with repetition that I learned to transform manual work into architecture.
Against the cult of technical suffering
The market loves romanticizing exhaustion.
It loves selling the image of the overwhelmed professional drowning in context, proud of sustaining broken processes through personal effort.
It loves treating exhaustion as proof of value.
It loves confusing unnecessary complexity with depth.
The Lazy Programmer rejects this theater.
He knows that technical maturity is not about tolerating more chaos.
It is about systematically reducing chaos.
It is not about memorizing steps.
It is about deleting steps.
It is not about accepting friction as an inevitable part of work.
It is about asking why that friction still exists.
I do not buy into this aesthetic of exhaustion: a good system reduces friction, it does not manufacture martyrdom.
The future always belonged to him
Now we have generative models, agents, orchestration, automation on top of automation, conversational interfaces, and intent-driven execution.
Perfect.
But let us tell the truth without decoration: all of this fit perfectly into the mindset of the people who already carried the core instinct behind it.
The Lazy Programmer had already dreamed of this world.
A world where describing intent matters more than executing ritual.
A world where the machine absorbs operational load and the human moves up a level.
A world where human intelligence is not wasted on repetitive tasks.
The hype changed the tools.
It did not change the principle.
AI only accelerated a vision I already had a long time ago: the human brain was not made to function as a manual script.
Then let us embrace the title
Yes, Lazy Programmer.
In the noble sense.
In the technical sense.
In the almost philosophical sense.
Lazy because he refuses to become a slave to repetitive tasks.
Lazy because he automates before he obeys.
Lazy because he prefers thinking better over working worse.
Lazy because he wants to transform raw effort into reproducible systems.
And in the end, it was this “lazy” programmer who pushed engineering forward while everyone else applauded spreadsheets, clicks, and performative suffering.
If being lazy means automating before obeying, then I wear that title with absolutely no shame.
Final declaration
We do not program merely to make software work.
We program to remove tasks that should never continue existing.
We do not automate out of weakness.
We automate out of lucidity.
We do not avoid work out of cowardice.
We eliminate waste out of respect for intelligence.
And every time a manual process dies, a script is born, a rule prevents an error, a tool compresses effort, and a system starts carrying on its own what previously depended on human suffering, the Lazy Programmer wins once again.
Because he always knew something the rest of the market is only now beginning to realize:
the highest form of programming is refusing stupid work with enough sophistication that it never returns again.
After 24 years as a Full Stack Web developer, my response to repetition stopped being effort and became architecture.
Senior Vibe Coder
A Senior Vibe Coder is not just someone who “uses AI to write code faster.”
Anyone can learn that. Seniority exists on another layer entirely.
A senior can operate across multiple fronts simultaneously because he does not think only about functions, screens, or endpoints. He thinks about systems, context, trade-offs, integration, risk, and evolution.
When helping the AI, he is not merely asking for code. He is guiding architecture, validating decisions, breaking down problems, identifying hidden coupling, and preventing speed from becoming entropy disguised as progress.
That is why a senior is not merely a code writer.
He is a software architect and engineer.
Code is only one of the outputs of reasoning.
Before it come mental models, flow design, quality criteria, modularization strategy, observability, security, maintenance, and scalability.
AI can accelerate execution, but it still needs someone capable of seeing the entire board without falling into the “it works on my machine” theater 😅
The true senior vibe coder does not outsource thinking to AI.
He orchestrates AI in multiple directions without losing technical coherence.
That is what separates someone who merely generates code from someone who truly builds software.
