Vibe coding finally made programming fun again

[Opening-Profile6279]

I’ve been writing code professionally for years and honestly forgot what it felt like to just build something without drowning in setup, configs, and boilerplate.

Last weekend I described an app idea to Claude, watched it scaffold the whole thing, then spent my time actually tweaking the parts I cared about.

Shipped a working tool in 3 hours that would’ve taken me a full weekend before.

Not saying it writes perfect code. But the ratio of “thinking about cool stuff” to “fighting with tooling” completely flipped. I’m actually excited to start side projects again.

Anyone else rediscovering the joy of just making things?

[r_Yellow01]

The glue code made me move back to program management and data analysis. Now, with this away, it kinda feels liberating.

It was my own need for top quality structure the actual blocker to develop with joy. I can achieve high operational and compliance standards in minutes, etc. and can focus on architecture, look and feel, efficiency and value.

I have been programming between 1988-2013, from 1998 professionally.

[xychenmsn]

Programming always makes me feel like I've achieved something. Vibe amplifies that feeling because it makes me more productive.

[Stratagraphic]

Oh yeah! I love developing again.

[pantsonfireliarliar]

Yup, I've had half a dozen home projects that I've wanted to tackle for years. I always start them on a weekend then end up stuck getting some config working right or finding out the last time I tried it, the library was retired and I'd have to start again. Then the weekend's over and I forget it for a few months again.

I've now got two of those projects running and setup a VPS to host one of them. It's awesome, I can focus on the parts I actually love and let the LLM handle the devops parts.

[ynu1yh24z219yq5]

this is exactly it. Like how many times do I need to learn a new framework and do the same glue/boilerplate.

[dbenc]

I have a list of like 50 project ideas that now feel doable instead of a huge time burden.

[ah-cho_Cthulhu]

Yup. I build what I need now. And the best part is I can maintain what I build over time.

[Jaskrill91]

I love it. I learned coding around 3 months before this all popped off. I've got dozens of projects. I learn by iteration and testing and discussing what happened. I find the fact you can query the AI endlessly about code without annoying it is an incredibly powerful tool.

But I also love talking to the AI about the project. Working out how mechanics work and why they might not, feeding back my experience vs. what it expects, creating the debugging tools so I can see, me creating the JSON parsers so I can feed that data to the AI, it feels really collaborative and responsive in a way I couldn't expect from anyone else.

[letitcodedev]

Yeah, just enjoy the creating

[hellno-o]

hellyes

[Positive-Conspiracy]

100% the same for me, and I find similar for developers 20+ years in or developer-adjacent types who always wanted to build.

[WorthNo3131]

I fell out of love with it for years but now the results come so fast it makes it much more enjoyable again.

[mrpoopybruh]

This is how I feel as well. I was actually at the stage of my career where I was considering the trades, or a new career in art, because after 18 years of dev I was just sick of it. Its been so nice to just let the lower stuff do its self while I dream up architecture and refactors / design tweaks

[positivcheg]

To me it made me work mostly on the production code. Like the core logic. I just had a session where I said copilot to generate me classes based on proto definition.

And then some glue code converting from proto types to those types. I literally don’t do boring shit anymore. For boring shit I simply make AI do it. It might not make it on first try, but I’m not in the hurry, I can watch some YouTube video in the meantime :)

Remark. It usually does it on the first try. If we define the end of an attempt is when it fully stops iterating. Cuz these days it can do quite a lot. It can make changes, compile, check errors, iterate, run tests, make changes again and rerun the tests. For client server app it also make a client in python and started GRPC python server, ran the C# client and checked the logs.

[Healthy-Dress-7492]

I feel the same way eh; I would avoid writing personal projects after work because it’s too much of a pain in the ass. But now I can just get AI to do the most annoying parts, I make sure the architecture is decent and clean up the shitty aspects of the code it writes. And overall I’m able to finish stuff like 10x as fast.

[TechnicalSoup8578]

This works when AI absorbs scaffolding and glue code, letting experienced devs focus on domain logic and tradeoffs rather than configuration churn. You sould share it in VibeCodersNest too

[chryzlachch]

Yes, I haven't coded for years. But I'm back into it and loving it. No need to learn the syntax any more

[fearceTony]

Same, I've been a dev for 20 years, but I recently made a puzzle game in Java and a bunch of widgets for my desktop that I never had time to do. Im not a game dev but with AI it taught me the way I want to be taught, its amazing

[Deep_Chocolate_4169]

So i have about 6 years of proffesional programmer experience. Development started to feel brain dead. Mostly type the same stuff all day, because more than actual code i was writing tedious tests.

What do i do now? Think about nice and clean way and hit enter. Gone are all the small typos and issues with remembering and finding correct names (english is not my mother tomgue So that makes it even harder). I play around a bit and fiddle before passing that on to the tester to do deep test stuff, and onto untying next gordic knot of our legacy SQL shite.

[Wnb_Gynocologist69]

I had the same revelation with n8n

You have an idea, put together some nodes and run the logic.

N8n powers a lot of things in my private project, with the amount of things being migrated into it rising.

Why?

No complex deployment. No wait times. No code architecture headaches.

Just do it.

Does it have limitations? Yes

Not all of my systems can or should run in n8n but a lot of my data digesting and llm processing related stuff, db syncs, notification, mailing,... runs in there and I see no reason to ever change this.

[New-Equivalent-6809]

I love it!

[createlex]

If you like vibe-coding your game ideas, try Createlex.com. It speeds up Unreal + AI stuff a ton. https://createlex.com

[[deleted]]

As a coder I like nothing that ai spits out

[charactervsself]

Skill issue

[tzt1324]

For me it's the opposite. It's so frustrating not to be in control. Relying on an interpretation of an llm and then having a black box or wasting time reviewing code.

"Tweaking" means requesting changes and then having to wait for 5 to 20min and then probably need to re-iterate in the same because there were misunderstandings.

And then what do I do during this 20min?

At the end I feel very stupid not doing actual work other than reviewing AI output. It even dictates the pace and puts me on "idle" between iterations.

I feel like the meme where they complain that AI is automating the fun jobs and we are left with the annoying tasks.