2 months ago, after I started using Claude Code on my side project, within the space of days, I went from not allowing a single line of AI code into my codebase to almost 100% AI-written code. It basically codes in my exact style and I know ahead of time what code I expect to see so reviewing is really easy.
I cannot justify to myself writing code by hand when there is literally no difference in the output from how I would have done it myself. It might as well be reading my mind, that's what it feels like.
For me, vibe coding is essentially a 5x speed increase with no downside. I cannot believe how fast I can churn out features. All the stuff I used to type out by hand now seems impossibly boring. I just don't have the patience to hand-code anymore.
I've stuck to vanilla JavaScript because I don't have the patience to wait for the TypeScript transpiler. TS iteration speed is too slow. By the time it finishes transpiling, I can't even remember what I was trying to do. So you bet I don't have the patience to write by hand now. I really need momentum (fast iteration speed) when I code and LLMs provide that.
I dont mean to question you personally, after all this is the internet, but comments like yours do make the reader think, if he has 5x'ed his coding, was he any good to begin with? I guess what I'm saying is, without knowing your baseline skill level, I dont know whether to be impressed by your story. Have you become a super-programmer, or is it just cleaning up stupid stuff that you shouldn't have been doing in the first place? If someone is already a clear-headed, efficient, experienced programmer, would that person be seeing anywhere near the benefits you have? Again, this isn't a slight on you personally, it's just, a reader doesnt really know how to place your experience into context.
I have a computer science degree and quite experienced. In the last 10 years, I've created a few side projects and also worked as a senior engineer professionally. I was engineer #3 at what later became the #1 biggest Maths e-learning platform in my country. I later built a popular distributed open source WebSocket pub/sub system which auto-scales on Kubernetes (with load balancing and sharding). I lead the development of the P2P layer of a $300 million+ market cap crypto project in Germany. I wrote a multi-chain Decentralized Exchange from scratch along with a minimalist PoS blockchain with support for instant finality. Then I wrote a multi-tenant no-code serverless platform to build/host any kind of app. Then (in part to demonstrate the search and indexing capabilities of the serverless no-code platform), I used this platform to build a multi-tenant people/company search platform which allows users to crawl the web and tag data using vector embeddings using a BFS algorithm (current side project). I'm still running all these projects in parallel because they require very little maintenance. My blockchain nodes have been running for 4 years straight. I restarted a node twice in 4 years due to infrastructure issue so very reliable.
Obviously, I suck at business and marketing. I only had one relatively financially successful product (my open source project, ironically) but I'm definitely able to build features quickly and in a stable way according to spec.