Zen and the Art of Vibe Coding
Two years ago, at the tender age of 55, I took my first coding class and have been coding up a storm since then, admittedly with the constant assistance from helpful AI agents. I began by creating chatbots that allow users to speak to various philosophical and literary figures. Since then, I’ve been vibe coding an app that puts these philosophers in conversation with each other, fulfilling my lifelong dream of watching the greatest minds exchange arguments and ideas. My favorite is Socrates against the Buddha; they have their differences, to be sure, but they also seem to agree on some things. The Greek philosopher Lucian, by the way, had a similar idea and called it Dialogues of the Dead, which he placed in the underworld. At first I thought I was doing the same, but then a student pointed out that really it’s more like creating a Jurassic Park for philosophers. It’s time we brought the greatest minds in history back to life. God knows, we could use them.
Vibe coding has allowed me to speak to my favorite philosophers, but it has also introduced me to a mode of thinking that has been pretty alien to me: thinking like an engineer. At first, I assumed that creating an app was like writing a book, and in some sense it is. Both are concrete manifestations of ideas that need to be refined through a lot of trial and error. Just as with books, it’s crucial to get the right sequence of ideas and of interactions into the user interface of an app, and the underlying code with all its dependencies needs to be all in the right order. This is not so different from organizing sentences, paragraphs, and chapters in order to take readers from A to Z.
But the method is different. Words are more malleable. While there can be bugs in arguments, words let you fudge things to some extent. This is very much in contrast to code, which is more unforgiving: a single wrong turn can have cascading effects. This is why in coding so much time is spent repairing and debugging, fixing things. By the way, thank you very much, Claude Code.
As I was embarking on this second career as a vibe coder, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance popped into my mind. I had never actually read it, in part because I thought (wrongly, it turned out) that it contained a lot of New Age mumbo jumbo. But now that I was engaged in code maintenance, I finally cracked open the book’s spine, or rather, swiped my finger across my tablet.
It soon felt like the book had been waiting for me. I suspect that most passionate readers have had an experience like that. To be sure, we get a lot of other things out of reading, such as learning about the experiences of others, about places and manners, ideas and points of view we didn’t know before. But the main thing we chase is that rare moment when reading a book feels intensely personal, when someone’s voice is murmuring in our head and we begin to think, with surprise and gratitude, this was written for me.
On the face of it, there is little in the book that has anything to do with my own life. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is the story of a father who is taking his 12-year-old son, from whom he is estranged, on a motorcycle trip from Minneapolis through Montana to California. Along the way, he talks about what we would now call mindfulness: being attentive to the landscape that they drive through, the physical hardship of spending all day on a motorcycle and of camping in the wild, the state of mind that can come when you’re hiking up a mountain and you stop thinking about the goal and just take go one step at a time.
During his ride with his son through the American West, Pirsig grapples with his troubled past. He’d been a graduate student in philosophy, hoping to create a grand synthesis between Plato and Aristotle; but as he has also worked as a writing instructor, he is inwardly arguing against Socrates’ attacks on rhetoric. We also gather that Pirsig has suffered a breakdown, has gone through electroshock treatment, and now retains only fragmentary access to his former self, which he refers to as Phaedrus, one of Socrates’ opponents.
It’s in this situation that Pirsig develops the practice of motorcycle maintenance. The protagonist always fusses with his engine, listening to every change in sound, worrying about what it means, keeping every piece of the machine in tip-top shape. If you ride a motorcycle, you need to learn the art of motorcycle maintenance, diagnosing problems, catching them before they become more severe. Pirsig is as skeptical as anyone of relying too much on technology, which for him, writing in the early 1970s, meant TV and cheap manufactured goods. But that doesn’t prevent him from extolling the engineering mindset required to become a mindful user of tools. That’s the Zen of motorcycle maintenance.
While reading the book, I kept wondering what Pirsig would think of vibe coding. Probably he would see in my reliance on Claude Code a violation of his own Thoreau-inspired ideal of self-reliance. Certainly, without AI, I would fall flat on my face, coding-wise, and my projects would sputter and quickly grind to a halt. And yet, I have found his book to be something like a spiritual guide to coding. Vibe coding doesn’t just mean outsourcing coding to an AI agent. Because good AI agents are providing a running commentary on what they are doing, and why they are doing it, vibe coding is like an introduction to the engineering mindset for the uninitiated. As a lifelong writer and humanist, I had always been vaguely dismissive of the mechanical world and am now, in late middle age, slowly learning to appreciate mechanical maintenance as a mindset of great subtlety.
My favorite scene in the book is when Pirsig watches a welder at work:
When I show it [the broken chain guard] to him [the welder] he nods and slowly goes over and sets the regulators for his gas torch. Then he looks at the tip and selects another one. Absolutely no hurry. He picks up a steel filler rod and I wonder if he’s actually going to try to weld that thin metal. Sheet metal I don’t weld. I braze it with a brass rod. When I try to weld it I punch holes in it and then have to patch them up with huge blobs of filler rod. “Aren’t you going to braze it?” I ask.
“No,” he says. Talkative fellow.
He sparks the torch, and sets a tiny little blue flame and then, it’s hard to describe, actually dances the torch and the rod in separate little rhythms over the thin sheet metal, the whole spot a uniform luminous orange-yellow, dropping the torch and filler rod down at the exact right moment and then removing them. No holes. You can hardly see the weld. “That’s beautiful,” I say.
“One dollar,” he says, without smiling.
The welding scene stuck in my mind because it made me think that perhaps vibe coding would be fine with Pirsig after all, since he did have to rely on the welder. Total autonomy is impossible; what matters is the attitude of mindfulness toward engineering.
Pirsig learns a thing or two from the welder, but the two pieces he himself welds together are right in the book’s title: Zen and technology. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, Westerners seeking enlightenment in the East tended to be luddites hoping to escape the trappings of the modern world. Pirsig does the opposite. Instead of pitting ancient Zen against modern technology, he combines the two in ways that strike me as prophetic.
Varanasi
It so happens that I finished Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in Varanasi (Banares), where Pirsig went to study for a while. Fittingly, he didn’t go to the many traditional ashrams that line the Ganges River and instead studied at Banaras Hindu University (BHU), an institution founded in the early twentieth century with the explicit purpose of combining traditional Sanskrit learning and Ayurvedic medicine with modern science and technology. When I asked colleagues at BHU whether they were aware of the impact their institution had on Pirsig and his unlikely bestseller, the name didn’t ring a bell. For them, he was just one more Westerner coming through to learn something from them and then disappear.
It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be Banares while thinking about Pirsig—and I did a bit of vibe coding right here as well, in his honor. Inspired by Pirsig’s study of Zen Buddhism, I also spent a day at nearby Sarnath, the place where the Buddha first preached to a small group of followers. During the entire visit, I kept thinking about Pirsig’s desperate, moving book. It struck me that it captures what I want to cultivate through In Practice: putting philosophy—here Socrates and the Buddha—to use in real life, bringing insights from cultural history to bear on the world we live in today.
As we cruise through life, we repair our lives with the tools at hand, welding what we need on the road or getting others to weld them for us. This is what culture is meant to be: a collection of tools for life that we can use along the way. Figuring out what we need requires a particular form of attentiveness that might be called life maintenance.
Paying attention, there may be no more crucial habit...
I kept thinking about Pirsig’s idea of “gumption” — the inner reserve that helps you keep going when things break. Coding seems to drain it quickly, but also build it back in its own way.