alt Hacker NewsAgreed. I really don’t think this is worth arguing that AI can be a huge help. I was skeptical until April even after hearing many friends tell me how good Opus 4.5 was last year.
Not working on the “next big” thing but I only recently started finding that AI could solve complex problems for me starting around ChatGPT 5.5. Working on a game engine. Some of the quite isolated modules I’ve had it build are not good code by my own standards. The code has way too many indirections to say the least. But they work without bugs and perform well too (i have a very good CPU and memory management harness for my frame loop). My velocity on the project has doubled at least cause now stuff that I wanted to do down the line is already done. I’m definitely a bit careful with setting up isolated guardlines about which files I let a certain feature touch but with models like Fable even found that unnecessary.
Working code that performs exactly how I want on an outer level is valuable. It can be refactored and rearchitected or reimplemented better by just the virtue of having something to compare against and having the edge cases accounted for.
One of the first things I do before spending time with a coding agent on generating something is having a pretty long reasoning session where I pressure the agent to find out if the problem I'm solving has been solved before, at all, in any way. Most of the time, it has, and it probably doesn't have utility beyond my own personal education in solving it again.
That seems to be what most of these projects that get accused of being "vibe coded" are doing. Incidentally - there's nothing wrong with writing your own useful utilities, and educational to package these up for distribution/release, but don't be surprised if not another soul in the world finds the particular need you had to be one they share.