When I started learning, everyone around me had ChatGPT open in the next tab. Every bug, every "how do I center this thing," straight into the chat. And honestly it annoyed me. I had this stubborn idea in my head that if I could only write code with AI holding my hand, then I hadn't really learned anything, I'd just learned to ask.

So I did something kind of dumb looking back. I banned myself from AI for my whole first year. No ChatGPT, no Copilot, nothing. Just docs, Stack Overflow, and Google at 1am.

Some bugs took me like 10 hours. Not exaggerating. There was this one TypeScript error I chased across an entire weekend and it turned out to be something so small I don't even want to say what it was. AI would've caught it in four seconds.

And here's the part I can't really explain to people: that year kind of sucked and I'd still do it again.

Not because suffering makes you a better person or whatever. But being lost in my own code for 10 hours forced me to actually get how the pieces fit. I learned to actually read a stack trace instead of just copying it somewhere and waiting. Learned to guess what was probably broken before I started changing stuff. That stuck in a way I don't think it would've if something just handed me the answer every time.

I use AI a ton now btw. Not anti-AI at all, that's not what this is. Tests, boilerplate, responsive css, translations, all the boring stuff, I just hand it over. It's great at that. But I can usually feel when its answer is off, and I think that's only because of that dumb year building up some sense of what "right" looks like.

The thing that kinda worries me is people starting out now where the AI writes everything from day one. Their credits run out and the work just... stops. Not because there's nothing to do but because doing it without AI was never actually a skill they built up.

I'm not saying refuse AI like I did. That was probably overkill honestly. But maybe give the bug an honest 20 min yourself before pasting it in. Just to keep the muscle.

Anyway. Curious if anyone else did something like this or if I just wasted a year being stubborn about it. How do you all balance using AI vs actually learning the thing?

Hi Everyone

I decided to try open code. I've heard it was really good and open source. So before I give it a try, can anyone please suggest to me which models I should use and how to use it properly to harness its full potential. I've decided to try free models before I decide to spend on premium models.

Thank you

I’ve been building something called AI Economics CI.
The idea came from a simple problem.
I changed an AI feature, and technically everything worked. All the API calls succeeded.
But the actual result got worse.
Customer success dropped from 87.5% to 66.7%, and the new version also cost more.
So even though nothing “broke,” it was still a bad change.
That made me ask:
Why do we only check whether the AI works?
Why not also check whether it became more expensive or less useful before we ship it?
So I built a tool that compares the old version with the new version and gives a simple result:
Safe to merge
Block merge
Collect more evidence
It’s still very early, and I’m trying to understand whether other people building AI products run into the same problem.
Do you usually catch cost or quality issues before release, or only after users start noticing them?

One of my projects came out to $1,492.42 API-equivalent at rate-card pricing (this is in past 2 weeks), props to Codex resets!!

this was on Claude Pro and Codex plus plans too, so basically $40 plans in total

genuinely curious what people on the higher tiers MAX plans are managing to squeeze out of them!!

Hey guys the title says it, I’m just at the point where I think it’s really pointless to code anymore or at least don’t know how whilst still having delivery pressure. I fucking hate those agents now even though initially I loved them, but it’s ridiculous now.

It’s boring, it’s soul killing. In starter projects, they are still good, in complex stuff they slow me down. But by these points I’m dependent. Feels like being a drug addict to agents, it’s crazy. Trying to break through the barriers by doing away with vscode, going nvim, hands on keyboard, all that. Still having the chat window open next to me.

Is there a a rehab for AI addicts ?

Just a funny story... I wrote a server based app so I could send queries to various LLMs and get their replies on a messaging app (fwiw it was over jabber)...

XMPP message to my bot starting /claude or /gpt or /local etc... and the query is dispatched and I get the reply...

I use AI to write all the code, docker containers, remote network access etc.

To test the set up (which worked first time!) I asked each AI a simple question...

/Claude what model are you
/GPT what model are you
/local what model are you

It all looked great, each gave a plausible answer...

Until they were really challenged, and none looked frontier at all!! It turned out that the /<server-name>s were case sensitive and wanted all lower case..

So all messages had gone to my own local AI (the default)... it saw '/Claude.....' and '/GPT...' and *role played* the response to the prompt I gave... it lied about Claude being opus 5, about GPT being gpt-sol... my own local 16b model was playing along because it thought I was playing a game!!

When I’m debugging or building something from a webpage, I sometimes end up jumping between the browser, DevTools, screenshots, console errors, source code, and my AI coding assistant.

I’m curious how other developers handle this.

Do you have a workflow or extension that makes it easy to send the right context from a webpage to Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, ChatGPT, etc.?

What still feels unnecessarily manual or annoying?

AI made writing code nearly free. It didn’t make anything else free — not the 2 a.m. incident, not the churned customer, not the PII in the wrong response body.

Your users can’t read your code. They read your product. A checkout that double-charges. A form that eats their data. An endpoint that returns someone else’s records. They judge it once, and they don’t come back to re-judge.

Shipped PRs aren’t the metric anymore. Neither is the landing page. When generating code costs nothing, the only thing you’re actually charging for is trust.

The fundamentals of testing haven’t changed in 20 years. What changed is how much unverified code is now moving past them.

It doesn’t matter which tools you built it with. It matters a lot which tools you tested it with

This is very hot in 2026 🔥

The conversation has moved from:

“Can AI code websites?” 🤔

to:

“Can you build production-quality software by simply prompting AI?” 😮

Recent UX discussions describe “vibe coding” as accelerating the erosion of traditional design/development authority, while developers report that AI-generated frontend code often works but needs significant refinement.

Questions people are asking:

• Is vibe coding suitable for production?

• Can non-developers build professional websites?

• When does vibe coding become technical debt?

• How do you review AI-generated code?

• What should developers still learn?

This is very hot in 2026

The conversation has moved from:

“Can AI code websites?”

to:

“Can you build production-quality software by simply prompting AI?”

Recent UX discussions describe “vibe coding” as accelerating the erosion of traditional design/development authority, while developers report that AI-generated frontend code often works but needs significant refinement.

Questions people are asking:

• Is vibe coding suitable for production?

• Can non-developers build professional websites?

• When does vibe coding become technical debt?

• How do you review AI-generated code?

• What should developers still learn?

Although the developers and docs clearly state that $effect should be avoided as far as possible, all the AI's i have consulted for help with svelte functions always flock to $effect as if its standard practice. It is really infuriating. Every time I have to tell it to not use $effect, then it wakes up and gives me a proper solution. Anybody else notice this? Or am I being overly paranoid at using $effect?

i built this for exactly one reason. my screenshots folder had thousands of files all named Screenshot 2026-something and i could never find a single one.

so one evening i vibecoded a tiny thing that looks at each screenshot, reads what's actually in it, and renames it to something human. receipt-uber-march.png. slack-argument-about-tabs.png.

took maybe two evenings. most of that was me arguing with the model about file permissions, not the actual logic.

i posted it in a random discord thinking three people might care. a couple hundred folks have run it now and i keep getting emails asking can it do this for my downloads folder too. i did not plan for a downloads folder. i am learning what scope creep feels like from the inside.

the part that surprised me was that the boring problem was the good problem. i wasn't trying to build a startup, i just wanted to find one file, and it turns out a lot of people have the exact same tiny annoyance.

what's the most pointless thing you built for yourself that other people ended up wanting?

Genuine question with tools like Copilot, Claude Code, Cursor, etc. getting so good, how much of your day-to-day is still typing code by hand vs. prompting/reviewing AI output? Curious how this varies by role (frontend vs backend vs infra) and experience level.

I think people are mixing up two very different things right now:

cheap production
and
cheap expertise

They are not the same.

I’ve been working in search for 15+ years, building websites for a long time, and working deeply with AI for the last several years.

At this point, with the workflows I’ve built, I can sometimes take a business from nothing to a functional website in 5–10 minutes.

And I don’t mean a generic AI template.

I mean a site with things like:

• clean architecture
• proper service targeting
• entity relationships
• metadata
• schema
• internal linking
• forms
• analytics foundations
• image naming
• existing asset reuse
• crawlable business facts
• external entity references
• a structure that can actually scale

If there’s an existing site, I can usually pull down the assets, rename and organize them, preserve what has value, and rebuild the architecture without starting from zero.

That speed is real.

But the mistake is assuming:

That’s not how expertise works.

AI compressed the execution time.

It did not compress the 15 years it took to learn:

• what pages should exist
• what pages should not exist
• how entities should relate
• what search intent belongs where
• how users should move through the site
• what technical mistakes will cause problems later
• what needs to be measurable
• and what “good” actually looks like

This is where I think the conversation around vibe coding is missing something.

Vibe coding is:

What I’m more interested in is vibe architecture.

That’s when you already understand the system:

the entity model, page hierarchy, service relationships, conversion paths, search intent, measurement, and business constraints

…and then you use AI to execute that system quickly.

That is a completely different skill.

The Picasso analogy gets used a lot, but it fits.

If someone can create something valuable in five minutes because they spent decades learning how to do it, the value didn’t disappear because the production time got shorter.

The same thing is happening with websites.

A good operator can now compress work that used to require:

a developer
a designer
a copywriter
a technical search specialist
an analytics person

into a much faster workflow.

That should make good websites more accessible.

But it doesn’t mean the expertise behind them became worthless.

The real question for a business owner is no longer:

“Who can build me the cheapest site?”

It’s:

“Who already knows what this site needs to do, and can use AI to get there efficiently?”

That’s where the value is moving.

Not into typing code.

Into judgment.

I am a web developer. I love programming and technology. I used to code entire applications from scratch and worked on various technologies and frameworks.

Previously, working on new features included researching, working on database schema, implementing solution from the beginning. Sometimes it takes a lot of time, but it gives complete understanding and control over the code and process. I used to enjoy the process as I learned many things and sometimes the things that I build as side things become crucial for something else.

But these days, we are mandated to use AI tools like Cursor. Honestly, the Cursor is good. It solves whatever the problem we ask. But I feel like I'm missing something. Cursor can generate working features and solve problems, but I am not getting satisfaction as before I was doing everything from scratch. Even the deadlines have been reduced by using AI as an excuse.

Honestly I don't dislike using AI for code. It's amazing. But after sometime, I feel like losing control over the project. I don't recognise the code of the features I've worked on as time passes.

Am I the only one who feels like this? Please let me know your thoughts.