Why Vibe Coding Makes Your Mechanical Keyboard A Learning Disability

In 1623, the "water-poet" John Taylor claimed that coaches would cause men to abandon the practice of riding on horseback and ruin their morality by facilitating "riot, whoring, and drunkenness."

Taylor was a man of deep convictions and even deeper grievances. He didn't just dislike coaches; he saw them as an existential threat to the very fabric of human discipline. He famously wrote:

"A coach is common, so is a whore: a coach is costly, so is a whore; a coach is drawn with beasts, a whore is drawn away with beastly knaves. A coach has loose curtains, a whore has a loose gown, a coach is laced and fringed, so is a whore: a coach may be turned any way, so may a whore: a coach has bosses, studs, and gilded nails to adorn it: a whore has Owches, brooches, bracelets, chains and jewels to set her forth: a coach is always out of reparations, so is a whore: a coach has need of mending still, so has a whore: a coach is unprofitable, so is a whore: a coach is superfluous, so is a whore."

Anyway, why am I talking about 17th-century horses and whores in a post about vibe coding?

Because you’ll find similarly strong feelings among many Senior Devs today. To them, vibe-coding isn’t just an efficiency tool; it’s a moral decay of the craft. They worry it’s creating a generation of "Imbecile Juniors" who don’t know a thing about system design—kids who can prompt but can’t architect. To them, if you don’t type every line of code by hand, you’ll never "truly" understand how it works. They’ve mistaken the performative struggle of manual typing for learning how to build software.

And while they’re busy polishing their $500 mechanical keyboards and enjoying the "thock" of hand-typing boilerplate, they’re missing the fact that their favorite tool has become a learning disability as vibe coding goes mainstream.

The "Learning by Doing" Syllogism

We all agree on the golden rule of education: Learning by doing is the most effective way to master a craft.

The Senior Dev argument is a simple, clean syllogism: If "learning by doing" is the gold standard, and the primary "doing" of software engineering is typing code, then hand-typing every semicolon is the only way to truly learn.

It sounds logical. It sounds like "grit." But if you actually look at the cognitive science, you’ll realize they’ve mistaken the act of production for the act of learning. Hand-typing boilerplate isn’t the "doing" that matters—it’s Extraneous Load Sabotage.

The Science of Vibe Learning

John Sweller’s Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) distinguishes between three types of mental effort. In the world of the "Manual Purist," their entire day is eaten up by Extraneous Load—the annoying, low-value struggle of fighting syntax, chasing missing semicolons, and hand-writing useEffect hooks.

Research confirms that the physical act of production can create a cognitive bottleneck: Tindle and Longstaff (2015) demonstrate that complex motor tasks overload the Central Executive, forcing the brain to divert its limited attentional resources toward the mechanics of execution rather than the processing of information. When Working Memory is saturated by the 'cognitively complex' demands of production, the brain effectively loses the bandwidth required to encode and manipulate the logic of what is being created.

In other words, when your working memory is saturated with the "how" of syntax, you literally don't have the bandwidth left for the "why" of architecture.

Creation and Metacognition vs. "Yolo-Copying" 🤡

AI only impairs learning if you treat it as a Replacement for thought. If you treat it as a Collaborative Partner, the results are reversed.

By "vibe-coding" with intent, you’re utilizing the "Worked Example Effect." Instead of struggling to generate code from a blank screen, you are reviewing a high-quality pattern. You’re shifting from the bottom of Bloom’s Taxonomy ("Remember/Understand") to the top ("Analyze/Evaluate").

The Solution: The Yoda Workflow 🧘‍♂️✨

If "YOLO-coding" is a frantic, impulsive sprint toward a broken merge commit, then the solution is the Yoda Workflow.

Think of it as architectural Tai Chi. Instead of "keyboard mashing" your way through a feature, you adopt a state of deliberate, slow-motion awareness. You don't just accept the AI’s output; you meditate on it. You poke the patterns, you test the boundaries, and you move with Tai-Chi-like intentionality.

Here’s how this workflow works:

Imagine you're a junior building the quintessential Todo app. You've got your tasks, and now you want to sort them. You start with a basic sortTasks function, passing in a string like 'priority' or 'dueDate'. Inside, you've got this ever-growing, gnarly switch statement that handles the logic for each type.

Maybe you don't even realize this is a problem yet. That’s fine. Your first step isn’t implementation. It’s asking for a Code Review. For example, prompt the LLM: "Review this code against SOLID principles. Is there a smell here?"

Once the LLM calls out the violation of the Open-Closed Principle, you don't just say "fix it." That's Yolo-coding. Instead, you ask for the Plan: "I want to refactor this using the Strategy Pattern. Break down the steps you would take to do this incrementally."

This is the secret sauce. By forcing the LLM to explain the steps, you are encoding the architectural transition into your own brain. You execute the refactor in tiny, bite-sized prompts. You aren't just looking at the final code; you are dissecting the diffs.

Finally, you poke the design. You ask for a whimsical "Vibe-Based Sort" (sorting by "Based" vs "Cringe" energy) and realize you only have to add a single class without touching the core engine. In five minutes, you’ve achieved a higher-order understanding of the pattern than you would have in five hours of performative manual struggle.

If you find yourself reviewing a 5,000-line diff, you're prompting wrong. Learn to steer the LLM to execute surgical commits.

Conclusion

Insisting on manual typing is just performative struggle. It’s like refusing a washing machine because you want to "appreciate the fabric" by scrubbing your clothes in a river for three hours. You aren't "learning the fabric"; you're just getting wet and tired.

The keyboard is just an input device, not a shrine. Stop being a Syntax Groom. 😀