Comment by Cyan488
1 day ago
I agree with the side-project thing, where the code is only incidental to working on the real project. I recently wanted to organize thousands of photos my family had taken over decades and sprawled on a network drive, and in 5 minutes vibe-coded a script to recursively scan, de-dupe, rename with datetime and hash, and organize by camera from the EXIF data.
I could have written it myself in a few hours, with the Python standard docs open on one monitor and coding and debugging on the other etc, but my project was "organize my photos" not "write a photo organizing app". However, often I do side projects to improve my skills, and using an AI is antithetical to that goal.
I've found a lot of utility in this. Small throw away utility apps where I just want to automate some dumb thing once or twice and the task is just unusual enough that I can't just grab something off the shelf.
I reached for claude code to just vibe a basic android ux to drive some rest apis for an art project as the existing web UI would be a PITA to use under the conditions I had. Worked well enough and I could spend my time finishing other parts of the project. It would not have been worth the time to write the app myself and I would have just suffered with the mobile web UI instead. Would I have distributed that Android app? God no, but it did certainly solve the problem I had in that moment.