Last Tuesday I caught myself staring at a loading spinner for the third time in ten minutes. An AI agent was writing code for me — or trying to, it kept getting the auth flow wrong — and I was just sitting there watching tokens stream across my screen. Like watching someone else do a puzzle. Except you can't help. You just have to wait until they're done and then tell them which pieces are in the wrong place.
This is my job now, apparently.
I've been vibe coding a lot lately. For the uninitiated: you describe what you want, an AI agent takes 30 to 120 seconds to generate code, you review it, point out what's broken, and it tries again. It works way better than you'd expect. But it's also turned me into something I didn't anticipate — a guy who mostly waits.
And I've been paying attention to what I actually do during the waiting. It's not great. I check Slack. I open Reddit. I scroll through threads I've already read. Sometimes I get up to make coffee and come back to find the agent finished 40 seconds ago and I've been AFK for no reason. One time I caught myself reading the Wikipedia article on capybaras while a Claude Code session was generating a database migration. I don't know why capybaras. That's just where my brain went.
The Dead Time
So I timed it. Over a couple of 2-hour vibe coding sessions, I had something like 35-45 minutes of pure dead time. Not "I could be doing something else" time — actual cannot-do-anything time. The agent is mid-generation. There's no point starting something else because I'll need to context-switch back in 45 seconds anyway.
35 minutes every two hours. Just gone. Fed to Reddit and the group chat.
(Yes, you could run multiple agents in parallel. Some people do. But now you're context-switching between multiple streams of generated code, each of which needs careful review. You haven't eliminated the dead time — you've traded it for cognitive overhead. The attention cost is the same problem wearing a different hat.)
And the thing is, the agents are getting better, which counterintuitively means more dead time, not less. Because you start trusting them with bigger tasks. Things that take 2-3 minutes to generate instead of 30 seconds. The gap is growing.
Push-ups
So I had this thought. Somewhere between my fourth coffee and the twins screaming in the background (I work from home, I have three kids under three, the "home office" is generous terminology for what's happening here) — what if I just did push-ups during the gaps?
And I tried it. I actually tried it for a couple of days. Agent starts churning, I drop and do a set. Or I grab the kettlebell that's been sitting in the corner of my office collecting dust since approximately forever. Agent finishes, I walk back, review the output, prompt again, go do another set.
It… kind of works? The timing lines up weirdly well. A set of kettlebell swings is about 20 seconds. Push-ups, maybe 30. A quick set of burpees if the agent is doing something meaty. These are exactly the gaps vibe coding gives you.
And I'm not going to oversell the science here but there is a Stanford study that found walking boosts creative output by something like 60%. You know that thing where you get a great idea in the shower? Exercise does the same thing. So there's at least an argument that you're coming back to each code review with a slightly better brain than if you'd spent the last minute reading about capybaras.
VibeGym (the Actual Idea)
So I started thinking about what this would look like as a real space. Not a gym with laptops. More like a coworking space that happens to have equipment scattered around. Kettlebells near the standing desks. Pull-up bars you can reach without relocating. Open floor space for burpees. Functional stuff you can pick up and put down without adjusting twelve settings.
You're at a standing desk. You kick off an agent task. It starts generating. You walk over, do your set, walk back. Screen shows the output is ready. Review, prompt, repeat.
I don't know. Maybe it's stupid. But the more I think about it, the more the current situation seems stupider. We've got millions of developers sitting motionless while machines write code for them, filling the gaps with content that makes them worse at the one thing they still need to do (review the output). That can't be the equilibrium.
The Part That Actually Worries Me
Here's where it gets less fun. That 35-45 minutes of dead time per session? That's valuable real estate. Not to you — to the companies building the agents. You're a captive audience with nothing to do, staring at a screen, waiting. That's basically the most monetizable state a human can be in.
How long until the generation screen has a "sponsored suggestion" sidebar? How long before the loading spinner is surrounded by "while you wait, check out…" cards? I see you, OpenAI. I see where this is going.
And that's the mild version. The really grim version is gamification. Streaks. Points. "Spin while you wait!" Some dopamine slot machine nonsense right there in your IDE. If you think that's far-fetched, remember that pull-to-refresh was literally designed by a guy who studied slot machines. The loading screen is the last unmonetized moment in your developer workflow. It's not going to stay that way.
I'd rather do kettlebell swings.
OK But Zoom Out for a Second
I'm aware of what I'm proposing here. I'm proposing we build gyms so that humans have something to do while machines do their jobs. That we optimize the idle time of the human in the loop.
We went from "AI will free developers to do more creative work" to "AI will free developers to do kettlebell swings between reviewing its creative work." That's… not what the TED talks promised.
There's something genuinely strange about a profession where your main skill is becoming "noticing when the machine screwed up" and your main daily challenge is "what to do with your body while the machine works." We used to joke about developers being brains in jars. Now we're kind of getting there, except the jar has wifi and a pull-up bar.
I'm Doing It Anyway
Look. I know how this reads. Guy notices his job is getting automated, copes by proposing a gym. "This is fine" energy.
But I have three kids under three and I'm not sleeping. My home office is a desk wedged into a corner that I defend from toddlers with my life. Between carrying twins around and chasing a two-year-old I get plenty of steps — just not the kind that come with mental clarity. The agents aren't going away and the dead time is only growing. And if the choice is between filling that time with Reddit or with something that makes me feel less terrible — I'm picking the kettlebells.
Could this be an actual business? Probably not. A watch app that detects agent generation time and suggests exercises that fit? Maybe. A hackathon where you build stuff using the vibe-and-lift loop? That could work as a one-off event.
But honestly I think the idea is interesting mostly because of what it says about where we are right now. We built machines that do our thinking. Now we need to figure out what to do with the rest of us.
I'm going to start with squats.