In Defense of Boring Tech.

There’s this running joke in tech circles: if it doesn’t have a shiny new framework, does it even count as coding? Earlier this year, Andrej Karpathy casually dropped the term “vibe coding” on Twitter, little did I know that framed the next big chapter in a developers life. The Internet ran with it. Don't get me wrong, where we are right now, is just great. Junior Devs are getting laid off or not getting hired at all because who needs them anymore when companies are saving a ton on AI generated code, "just hire a senior who reviews what the machine spits out!". Now suddenly, the idea of "building" something feels old school or worse, boring.

But here’s the thing: boring tech isn’t actually that boring.

The Charm of “Boring”

When I say boring, I don’t mean outdated or irrelevant. I mean tried-and-true. Stable. The kind of tools that don’t trend on Hacker News but quietly run the backbone of half the internet. Think Express, Postgres, or even plain old vanilla JavaScript. These aren’t glamorous, but they’re reliable. They scale. They work.

And sometimes, the real joy of coding isn’t inventing something new. It’s watching your app handle load without falling apart, or seeing a script run a thousand times without breaking. That’s the kind of satisfaction “boring” tech gives you.

Vibe Coding Has Its Place

We definitely need those quick bursts of experimentation. Build a flashy AI demo. Try out a new CSS framework. Spin up something ridiculous just because you can. It scratches the creative itch. But it can also become a trap. If everything you build is about the vibe, you miss the deeper lessons of building things that last.

Why this works:

• Predictability: You know what will happen when you deploy it. No surprises, no random dependency nightmares.
• Community wisdom: If you hit a wall, there are 10+ years of Stack Overflow answers waiting for you.
• Longevity: “Boring” stacks are what companies actually use. They survive hype cycles. They get jobs done.

What I love about boring tech is that it gets out of the way. No chasing weekly updates, no random breaking changes, no endless debates about whether I’m using the “cool” stack. It’s predictable. It lets me build faster, ship faster, and sleep at night knowing things won’t collapse because of some half-baked dependency. The truth is, most people using your product will never peek under the hood. They care about the experience, not the stack. And that’s exactly why boring tech wins.Like, there was a time, a phase, where every project had to be serverless. Functions everywhere. Ten micro-lambdas to serve one page. It looked futuristic until folks realized cold starts were wrecking performance, debugging was a nightmare, and the billing calculator read like a horror story. Sometimes a plain old server is… better.

At the end of the day, I get a feeling that vibe coding is more like summer fling energy. Not how it was in the 2015's. (good god I cannot get over that was 10 years ago). It was Stable, it’s reliable. Never out of style.

The sweet spot isn’t choosing one over the other. It’s knowing when to vibe-code and when to lean on boring tech. Tinker on weekends. Play with the latest tools. But when you’re solving real problems, don’t be afraid to reach for the boring stuff, it only means your production is battle-tested.