[zeumo]

Genuine question: what's the point of vibe-coding a personal, low-stake project?

I do work on such projects, but the main goal for me is to learn, not the end result. If the end result is important, then there it's overwhelmingly likely that someone already implemented it better than I ever would, and I should just use that implementation.

I have implemented a qoi codec or a gemini client, not because I needed to use either of those, but because I wanted to understand how image codecs or network protocols worked, from bytes to end result. In the end, I learned a bit more about how computers work, how they draw stuff on screen and communicate with each other. I don't believe I would have learned much by letting an LLM do the work for me. Nor do I believe that the LLM could have done a better job than all the existing implementations of those things.

[0xffff2]

Plenty of people have personal projects where the purpose is the end result. One small recent example of my own, I'm a long-time Garmin watch user. I struggled with learning all of the details of their custom language, runtime and SDK in the pre-LLM world. With agentic AI tools, it was dramatically easier to write a watch face that looked the way I wanted. From there, I very much did learn a lot and do a lot of re-writing and tweaking to make the code actually somewhat good, but the custom watch face was the point for me. I really couldn't care less about Garmin's esoteric tech stack. The only reason I bothered with everything after the vibe-coding step was to try to optimize power consumption where I could.

[QuercusMax]

I'm 43 years old, and I've been coding for as long as I can remember (I started on the C64 as soon as I could read, in order to play and make my own video games). I have applications I've worked on since I was a teenager which are still in active use in some version or another.

Code has always been a means to an end. The process is fun, sure (just like solving sudoku puzzles) but the real payoff is the results. I've never gotten any joy out of writing stupid python or bash wrapper scripts, just like I've never gotten any joy out of squeezing under a sink to fix a plumbing issue; the payoff is when my sink works properly, or I click a button and the program does what I need.

Getting a clever hack working? That's super fun, doesn't matter if I write it, my teammate writes it under my direction, or the AI writes the code for me. Figuring out a clever redesign that simplifies everything and is cool enough that I want to build it and share with the world? That's even better - because I'm proud of the idea and its successful execution even if I don't physically write the code myself.

[bigstrat2003]

I wish I could relate to that. For me, writing the code is the fun part - I couldn't care less about the end result. Sadly, it's the part that our industry seems determined (unwisely imo) to discard.

It's kind of like cooking - I don't need to bake a cake in order to have a nice cake to enjoy. The bakery makes very nice cakes I can purchase for far less effort. But there's no joy, no accomplishment, in purchasing a cake. Only in actually making it myself.

[QuercusMax]

But you don't get paid to make beautiful code - you get paid to solve problems.

[phil21]

The end result is the goal for most of my home projects these days.

I suppose you could put almost all my stuff under "devops" vs. "development" but the idea is the same.

Recently I "vibe coded" some IoT sensors to monitor my garden environmental parameters, and created dashboards/alerts around them. I could have done all those things myself, but I never would have had the inertia or couple weekends to burn to spin it all up from scratch and teach myself every tiny little nuance.

Now I have a mostly-okay output of some grafana dashboards and HA alerts for soil moisture, and some neat correlation between those sensors plus my irrigation and rainfall data.

Or just opening a chat with AI to use it's "WLED" skill to go change the holiday theme of my permanent RGB lights along the fenceline.

Sure, once in a while I want to drop down and learn a new skill for such projects. But there is already a whole lot of "physical" bits of these projects and the coding/IT work is just the final piece of the puzzle. These days it's much more of a chore than a discovery process to spin up the 516th Ubuntu VM I've configured over my lifetime and configure software to have it do something useful for me.

Same goes with a lot of "glue" type scripts and automations like getting backups all working and monitored across my personal IT infrastructure.

If I'm doing something for the joy of learning these days it's almost always going to be learning a new physical skill like welding or woodworking or something I can immediately see the results of my labor. I guess I'm simply burned out on computers, and find very little novel in what I want to accomplish.

For this sort of thing agentic AI has been eye opening to me. It definitely has informed how I plan to implement some tasks at work for my career, as I've seen the massive amount of time it can save for the tedium. Creative and mission critical stuff? Probably not for some time.

I've also never much been a "love of the game" sort of guy when it comes to programming. It's always simply been a means to an end. The outcomes are what matter to me. I find working with well designed architecture quite satisfying, but beyond that I really don't get some inherent joy in the process. Those late night 3am hacking sessions were always fun to me because of the result I achieved at the end of the process.

[alehlopeh]

As you stated, the point is the end result.

[dnnddidiej]

In this case to learn the tool. Then project could be anyrhihg. It could be a small CLI utility you dreamed of having for example. A k9s-like to replace those crappy guis you deal with at work maybe?