Exactly. People project all kinds of ethics on writing code. The constant hum of anti-LLM on HN is monotonous and telling. Hurt egos everywhere.

This is precisely it. If anything, AI gives me more freedom to think about more novel ideas, both on the implementation and the final design level, because I'm not stuck looking up APIs and dealing with already solved problems.

Can you elaborate on the implied claim that you've never built a project that you spent more than two months thinking about? I could maybe see this being true of an undergraduate student, but not a professional programmer.

Yesterday I had two hours to work on a side project I've been dreaming about for a week. I knew I had to build some libraries and that it would be a major pain. I started with AI first, which created a script to download, extract, and build what needed. Even with the script I indeed encountered problems. But I blitzed through each problem until the libraries were built and I could focus on my actual project, which was not building libraries! I actually reached a satisfying conclusion instead of half-way through compiling something I do not care about.

I think you're missing the general point of the post.

>AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.

The trigger for the post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders, whatever their coding chops are. For Show HN posts, the sentence I quoted precisely describes the things that would be mind-numbingly boring to Show HN readers.

pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves and also have some biochemist commenting, "I'm working at a so-and-so research lab and this is exactly what I was looking for!"

Now the biochemist is out there vibe-coding their own solution, and now, there is no way for the HN reader to differentiate your "robust" entry from a completely vibe-code noobie entry, no matter how long you worked on the "important stuff".

Why? because the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated. What we took for granted was that "knowing how to code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the problem." And that filter allowed for high-quality posts.

That is why the observation that you know longer can guarentee or have any way of telling quickly that the posters spent some time on the problem is a great observation.

The very value that you gain from vibe-coding is also the very thing that threatens to turn Show HN into a glorified Product Hunt cesspool.

"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded." etc etc

I tend to agree, this has been my experience with LLM-powered coding, especially more recently with the advent of new harnesses around context management and planning. I’ve been building software for over ten years so I feel comfortable looking under the hood, but it’s been less of that lately and more talking with users and trying to understand and effectively shape the experience, which I guess means I’m being pushed toward product work.

That's the key: use AI for labor substitution, not labor replacement. Nothing necessarily wrong with labor saving for trivial projects, but we should be using these tools to push the boundaries of tech/science!

You don't fit the profile OP is complaining about. You might not even be "vibe" coding in the strictest sense of that word.

For every person like you who puts in actual thought into the project, and uses these tools as coding assistants, there are ~100 people who offload all of their thinking to the tool.

It's frightening how little collective thought is put into the ramifications of this trend not only on our industry, but on the world at large.