Guys, I learned a new technique and it's completely changed how I build software. I feel ethically compelled to post this before it gets rebranded into a framework and sold as a course.

So for context, like a normal modern developer, I've been vibe coding.

You know the workflow:

1. Describe what you want in English
2. Ask an AI to "build the app"
3. Wait
4. Watch it confidently invent a framework
5. Paste the output
6. Run it
7. Get an error in a file you didn't know existed
8. Ask the AI to fix the error
9. Repeat until you forget what the app was supposed to do

This mostly works, except when it doesn't, which is most of the time, and you never really understand why anything works when it does.

Anyway, last week my AI was slow and I still needed to add a button that increments a counter. So in a moment of desperation I tried something radical.

I opened a file.
And instead of asking anyone else to write the code…
I wrote it myself.

Just one tiny instruction at a time.

I'm calling this new paradigm:

PROGRAMMING
(Painfully Redundant, Obedient, Ground-Up, Manual, Mostly Intelligible, Non-Generative)

Yes, it's a recursive acronym.
Yes, that's how you know it's serious.

Here's how PROGRAMMING works.

You decide what you want the computer to do.
Then you tell it.
In advance.
In exact detail.
Using symbols.

For example, I wanted a counter.

Old workflow:
"Claude, build me a minimal reactive counter component with good state management and accessibility best practices."

Ten seconds later I get:

• 300 lines of TypeScript
• A custom hook
• Three TODOs
• A dependency that doesn't exist anymore
• A warning about edge cases I didn't know I had

New workflow:

let count = 0
count = count + 1
print(count)

It printed 1.

Immediately.

No suspense.
No retries.
No philosophical discussion about what a "counter" really means in a post-reactive UI paradigm.

This felt illegal.

The wildest part is latency.

With vibe coding, every thought has a network round trip. You ask. You wait. It thinks. It types a novel. You skim. You paste. You hope.

With PROGRAMMING:

• You type a line
• You press run
• The computer does exactly that line

Feedback loop is basically zero.

It's unsettling how obedient it is.

Another huge upside: you start understanding what's going on.

My old mental model of my own app was:

"There's some function somewhere that Claude wrote that probably handles that."

My new mental model is:

"Oh. That variable changes there.
Then this function runs.
Then this value gets returned."

It's like switching from astrology to physics.

The most shocking part is that you don't need the whole solution up front.

This blew my mind.

You can:

• Write a bad line
• Run it
• Watch it fail
• Fix the line
• Run it again

And the system is totally fine with this.

It doesn't get confused.
It doesn't try to be helpful.
It doesn't invent features you didn't ask for.
It doesn't refactor your business logic.

It just waits patiently for better instructions.

I tried using PROGRAMMING for something bigger. A tiny web app.

Instead of:

"Claude, build me a CRUD app with auth."

I did:

• Write a function that returns "hello"
• Make the browser show "hello"
• Change "hello" to user input
• Store the input in a variable
• Show it again

Each step took about 30 seconds and worked exactly as expected.

No side quests.
No dependency hell.
No surprise GraphQL layer.

Total time: 12 minutes
Total AI tokens used: 0
Total unexplained behavior: 0
Total sense of control: deeply unsettling

I think vibe coding accidentally trained us to believe that software has to be summoned, not constructed.

Like you're not supposed to touch the internals.
You just state your desire clearly and hope the machine god is in a good mood today.

But apparently you can just build things out of tiny obvious pieces. Like a psychopath.

Anyway, I'm not saying we should abandon vibe coding. It's still great for:

• Prototypes
• Marketing demos
• Generating files named final_final_REAL.ts

But for anything you actually care about working, I highly recommend trying PROGRAMMING.

Open a file.
Write a single instruction that makes sense.
Run it.
Then write the next one.

It's like Claude Code, except:

• Zero hallucinations
• Zero latency
• Perfect determinism
• Full interpretability
• And it runs offline in your skull

Honestly feels like cheating.