I'm the opposite. Between work and family, I don't get a lot of time to hole up in a cave with an IDE for fun. Prior to LLMs, it was a struggle to get much of anything done. So, I rarely tried. But, now I can get ideas fleshed out and even get code down in the small breaks I get to myself. Now I'm making progress where I wasn't before.

Sometimes I'm not interested in the inner workings of a technology, I just want a one-off tool. Ex: No interest in web tech. But, vibe-coded a tool to scrape and cross-reference a couple of online reports. Now I have the info I need for other projects.

Sometimes I know exactly what I want and it's quicker to hand-hold the AI through making it for me. Ex: Put together yet another SIMD math lib recently. SIMD intrisics are an obnoxious API. But, a non-SIMD implementation is easy to verify and many SIMD implementations are easy to validate vs. the non-SIMD reference. It's just a huge amount of obtuse code.

Sometimes I don't know exactly what I want and it's great to have a always-online partner to bounce questions off of, do rapid-prototyping for me, do code reviews for me. AIs aren't perfect. But, being instant, patient and often right makes them a huge improvement over online forums.