Why do you think that? I do regular ol' coding at my day job and have been vibe coding some side projects. They both require using my brain and both require my input for something to be created. They are different, though.
> Instead all you're doing is creating more cheap mediocre throwaway crap just because you can.
It probably is these things but since I'm just building stuff for myself, it hardly matters.
I've written a lot of code and a lot of that has been doing roughly the same thing. It's not a mental challenge; it's a chore. Sometimes it is really gratifying to code and try to figure stuff out. Often times it is not. So when it comes to building something in my free time, I'd prefer to avoid that sort of mental friction and banal tasks just to start working on the actual problem. More so than that, I'm building tools for myself to make my life easier so I can spend it more on something else.
I ride an electric bike with pedal assist. Does that mean I'm not really bicycling? Some might say yes and that it defeats the point. To me it ensures that I pick the bicycle more because it reduces friction to do so. I know that if I encounter a hill that the pedal assist will help me up it and thus I use it more and the net benefit outweighs the downsides. I think it's the same thing here.
I don't take pride in the work that an LLM does for me but I will happily benefit from it. It's a tool.
And just like with bikes, people who take pride in doing things the hard way can continue to do so. And they shouldn't belittle people who choose to use assistance.
I've been programming for 30+ years now, but I've always been fine with command line applications. Only recently I started getting into Qt to add a UI and turn my stuff into a real desktop application. It's been a real steep learning curve but I'm finally over it more or less.
Anyway I posted a screenshot of my application on LinkedIn, and mentioned it would be free and open source. I got HUNDREDS of comments from "LinkedIn-type people" all big name engineers that wouldn't HIRE me for anything but either made comments like "looking forward to integrating this into our workflows" or "not the first time someone tried to do this..."
Either way, instead of feeling motivated, I got the worst feeling that I'm doing all this work and people are either going to just take advantage of it and get the credit for "finding" it, or criticize it simply because it's not for them.
It bummed me out so bad that I stopped work on it entirely for like a month.
Anyway I finally came to look at it the way you mentioned. What I LIKED was the process of learning Qt and seeing my old programs come alive.
So instead, it's my "project car" now. I build it up and tear it down all the time. Totally redesign the data models just to see what advantages different designs can give me. Try make my own graphical views. Try implementing language translations.
It's been "finished" for a while now but I probably have five completely different-under-the-hood versions of it and THAT is what has been fun.
I use it constantly all day at work and I never mentioned it on LinkedIn again lol
I've been using the CHANGELOG [0] as a "blog" explaining WHY I made the changes and that's really been fun to look back and read too