by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-01-27 19:25:13+00:00
> I enjoy both and have ended up using AI a lot differently than vibe coders. I rarely use it for generating implementations, but I use it extensively for helping me understand docs/apis and more importantly, for debugging. AI saves me so much time trying to figure out why things aren’t working and in code review.

I had felt like this and still do but man, at some point, I feel like the management churn feels real & I just feel suffering from a new problem.

Suppose, I actually end up having services literally deployed from a single prompt nothing else. Earlier I used to have AI write code but I was interested in the deployment and everything around it, now there are services which do that really neatly for you (I also really didn't give into the agent hype and mostly used browsers LLM)

Like on one hand you feel more free to build projects but the whole joy of project completely got reduced.

I mean, I guess I am one of the junior dev's so to me AI writing code on topics I didn't know/prototyping felt awesome.

I mean I was still involved in say copy pasting or looking at the code it generates. Seeing the errors and sometimes trying things out myself. If AI is doing all that too, idk

For some reason, recently I have been disinterested in AI. I have used it quite a lot for prototyping but I feel like this complete out of the loop programming just very off to me with recent services.

I also feel like there is this sense of if I buy for some AI thing, to maximally extract "value" out of it.

I guess the issue could be that I can have vague terms or have a very small text file as input (like just do X alternative in Y lang) and I am now unable to understand the architectural decisions and the overwhelmed-ness out of it.

Probably gonna take either spec-driven development where I clearly define the architecture or development where I saw something primagen do recently which is that the AI will only manipulate code of that particular function, (I am imagining it for a file as well) and somehow I feel like its something that I could enjoy more because right now it feels like I don't know what I have built at times.

When I prototype with single file projects using say browser for funsies/any idea. I get some idea of what the code kind of uses with its dependencies and functions names from start/end even if I didn't look at the middle

A bit of ramble I guess but the thing which kind of is making me feel this is that I was talking to somebody and shwocasing them some service where AI + server is there and they asked for something in a prompt and I wrote it. Then I let it do its job but I was also thinking how I would architect it (it was some detect food and then find BMR, and I was thinking first to use any api but then I thought that meh it might be hard, why not use AI vision models, okay what's the best, gemini seems good/cheap)

and I went to the coding thing to see what it did and it actually went even beyond by using the free tier of gemini (which I guess didn't end up working could be some rate limit of my own key but honestly it would've been the thing I would've tried too)

So like, I used to pride myself on the architectural decisions I make even if AI could write code faster but now that is taken away as well.

I really don't want to read AI code so much so honestly at this point, I might as well write code myself and learn hands on but I have a problem with build fast in public like attitude that I have & just not finding it fun.

I feel like I should do a more active job in my projects & I am really just figuring out what's the perfect way to use AI in such contexts & when to use how much.

Thoughts?