Exactly this. Finding that annoying bug that took 15 browser tabs and digging deep into some library you're using, digging into where your code is not performant, looking for alternative algorithms or data structures to do something, this is where learning and experience happen. This is why you don't hire a new grad for a senior role, they have not had time to bang their heads on enough problems.

You get no sense of how or why when using AI to crank something out for you. Your boss doesn't care about either, he cares about shipping and profits, which is the true goal of AI. You are an increasingly unimportant cog in that process.

It's okay not to memorize everything involved in a software project. Sometimes what you want to learn or experiment with is elsewhere, and so you use the AI to handle the parts you're less interested in learning at a deep and intimate level. That's okay. This mentality that you absolutely have to work through manually implementing everything, every time, even when it's not related to what you're actually interested in, wanted to do, or your end-goal, just because it "builds character" is understandable, and it can increase your generality, but it's not mandatory.

Additionally, if you're not doing vibe coding, but sort of pair-programming with the AI in something like Zed, where the code is collaboratively edited and it's very code-forward — so it doesn't incentivize you to stay away from the code and ignore it, the way agents like Claude Code do — you can still learn a ton about the deep technical processes of your codebase, and how to implement algorithms, because you can look at what the agent is doing and go:

"Oh, it's having to use a very confusing architecture here to get around this limitation of my architecture elsewhere; it isn't going to understand that later, let alone me. Guess that architectural decision was bad."

"Oh, shit, we used this over complicated architecture/violated local reasoning/referential transparency/modularity/deep-narrow modules/single-concern principles, and now we can't make changes effectively, and I'm confused. I shouldn't do that in the future."

"Hmm, this algorithm is too slow for this use-case, even though it's theoretically better, let's try another one."

"After profiling the program, it's too slow here, here, and here — it looks like we should've added caching here, avoided doing that work at all there, and used a better algorithm there."

"Having described this code and seeing it written out, I see it's overcomplicated/not DRY enough, and thus difficult to modify/read, let's simplify/factor out."

"Interesting, I thought the technologies I chose would be able to do XYZ, but actually it turns out they're not as good at that as I thought / have other drawbacks / didn't pan out long term, and it's causing the AI to write reams of code to compensate, which is coming back to bite me in the ass, I now understand the tradeoffs of these technologies better."

Or even just things like

"Oh! I didn't know this language/framework/library could do that! Although I may not remember the precise syntax, that's a useful thing I'll file away for later."

"Oh, so that's what that looks like / that's how you do it. Got it. I'll look that up and read more about it, and save the bookmark."

> Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine. "here's my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time you've written the ring buffer, why are you not using one of the previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that the vibed code is more superior then your own coding?

There are a lot of reasons one might not be able to, or want to, use existing dependencies.

I assume you use JavaScript? TypeScript or Go perhaps?

Pfft, amateur. I only code in Assembly. Must be boring for you using such a high-level language. How do you learn anything? I bet you don't even know what the cog of the engine is doing.