Minimalism was supposed to give you your life back. That was the point. If you owned less, needed less, subscribed to less, watched less, clicked less, and carried less, fewer things could tell you what to do next. The empty apartment was never the achievement. The achievement was waking up with fewer claims on your money, attention, time, and nerve. Vibe coding and agentic engineering belong in that same argument. The point is not to prove that you personally handcrafted every individual code statement like an artisan making a chair. The point is to stop letting the work consume the life the work was supposed to support.
Simon Willison wrote today that "vibe coding" and responsible agentic engineering are getting closer than he would like. That is the uncomfortable part. The old distinction was flattering: amateurs vibe coded, professionals engineered. But now serious people are handing work to agents, reviewing less than they used to, trusting tests, and accepting that they do not personally understand every generated line before moving on. I do not have a clean answer to this, because I am using agents to write this blog. I use them because they let me move again. A voice memo becomes a draft. A thought that would have died in my head gets onto the page. That is not nothing. That may be the only reason this site is alive right now. The same is true in code. If the agent can do the dull part while I stay responsible for the direction, the test, and the final call, then the saved time is not cheating. The saved time is the point.
So the question is not whether AI touched the work. Of course it did. The question is whether the machine gave you more life or just more output to manage. Use the agent. Let it draft. Let it code. Let it save you from the blank page and the stupid boilerplate and the mechanical work that was never the point. Then come back. Read the thing. Run the test. Ask whether you would defend it with your name on it. If you would, publish, ship, close the laptop, and go do the thing the work was supposed to make possible. Take a walk. Cook dinner. Sit by the water. Call someone. Read a book. Live. The victory is not the number of hours you spent proving you still know how to type. The victory is getting those hours back without surrendering the responsibility for what you made.
Are you getting your life back with agents, or just generating more work to manage? Email me at ev@evbogue.com or text me at 773-510-8601.