So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?

There are (at least) two types of programmers. One type does it because they enjoy problem solving and programming is the best/most effficient way to solve those problems.

The joy comes from the problem no longer existing, being solved, not from the physical act of typing.

I don't really care, personally. What I care about is that something now exists which didn't exist before. A Ouija board would be equally as good.

Not even commissioned. You paid to ask Claude/Codex for an app.

> If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app…

Good news: It doesn't.

I just don't have to do the typing, pre-acceptance testing, fuzzing, etc.

Regardless of the answer (which I don't claim to actually know, but I'll bite), I've heard a related question as well: "Well, all you did was vibe-code it, anyone can do that!"

To which the obvious answer is often: then why didn't you think of it? And if you thought of it, why didn't you iterate on it and polish it to achieve a proper product that actually matched your vision?

For some people, they seem to believe that an idea isn't worth anything, and only the building is. And, even then, they don't really understand that building a proper product (even with vibecoding) takes a lot of effort to get right, because as you build you find more about the domain, about how the product should work, etc. Sure, loads of people vibecode crap, but many don't. They build things with real care over the course of many many many hours.

It's not that I love agile, but this is one of the reasons it exists. I wonder if the people who so openly bash solving a problem through vibecoding (with multiple iterations) also fail to see this value of agile?

To answer your question (acknowledging I don't really know): If all you had to do was get Claude/Codex to work and it came out perfectly very fast, then I believe you did commission it (and I have no problem with that), but, more often that that, you will have built it by iterating on product decisions.

When I "build" products for clients, I am not doing commission development work. In fact, I'm not building it for them -- we are building it together, learning requirements, failing, iterating. Otherwise, I would have just been a code monkey, and that I have sincerely despised for years.

Lastly: at least for now, the impact of knowing how to guide the AI is still very relevant. Good problem solvers who embrace AI completely blow "regular guys" out of the water. Maybe, as models get better, this will not be as prevalent, but you can clearly tell when someone "knows" what they're doing with the AI, even if they NEVER look at the code. The knowledge from the coding days is definitely partly transferable.