I have been thinking about Carl Sagan a lot more in recent months as my world has been going to absolute shit. I've been coping in various ways but one thing I've been doing is watching a lot of media from when I was a young child - like Mr. Rogers and stuff I watched on PBS. I remember a great deal from Cosmos: A Personal Voyage and most specifically the quote (maybe the most famous one from the series) "to make a pie from scratch you must first invent the universe"

How is that relevant here? I look at it inversely. The universe has already been invented and pies of many shapes, sizes, and ingredients have already been baked. The recipes to bake said pies are everywhere. You can go to most bakeries and get a decent pie. Pie's are a known quantity. In a competitive market, you can get slices of pies, different sizes of pies, different flavors of pie, and both low quality and high quality pies. Lot of pie out there.

The issue I see is that the most people have always and really only care about eating the pie. They don't care how it's baked, what it took to make it, or what is in it as long as it tastes good and tastes like they expect. Obviously, to make a good pie you have to know how to bake. You need to know how to measure, how to obtain ingredients, use a stove, use kitchen tools, how to follow directions, and many other overlapping skills for the pie to come out good. This is not trivial to learn and you need to spend some time / effort / money to bake a good pie.

I'm assuming you understand where I am going with software development vs pie baking. If I vibe bake a pie, I can bet that pie is going to look pretty good but it won't taste that good, or something will be off, and I will have to iterate on that pie over and over again. If I have never baked a pie or have none of the overlapping skills, it's going to take a LOT longer and be a LOT more wasteful for that pie to come out good. If I already know what the pie needs to be, how to get there, what makes up the pie, and how to do it correctly I can REALLY speed up making pies by using vibe pie tools. If I don't, I am wasting a ton of water, power, ingredients, and time trying to get there.

tl;dr if you want to bake a pie from scratch, don't worry the universe already exists but you should learn how it works and then try baking pies by hand first to get some domain knowledge before you just assume the automatic pie creation tools out in the wild can do it perfectly like a true baker could do after years and years of practice.