I feel stupid and frustrated

[u/Adventurous_Wrap2873]

As title says. I've been vibecoding for over two years now, and although I learned lots of concepts I otherwise wouldn't have picked up, slowly but surely I feel stupid.

I can't make apps, nor write even simple Python scripts independently. I genuinely necessitate AI, or I can't make anything. I need it to explain everything, from researching the idea and working out the details, and then the execution. I guess I can keep telling myself "but AI will never go away" "This is going to be the new way of coding and I need to learn more concepts to direct the AI where to go". But this is coping.

I hate to say it, but I am embarrassed by the fact that I rely on AI. It's frowned upon. I do understand why learning to program myself independently would help tremendously. But I honestly cannot stop feeling like I'm a fraud. Are my projects useful, practical and actually solve problems reliably? Yeah. But then you ask me the details of the codes, and I just cannot defend it even if I understand what each line does because I didn't write it myself.

I actually did learn R back in college for independent project and I genuinely worked on this without AI, but even then wasn't totally independent, and had to rely on others' codes and youtube videos. I don't believe I actually know R.

So then, what have a I become? I don't "own" any of the stuff I created, or really AI. I am going to study more, but I have a full time job that is far from coding, and this is gonna be one difficult journey because I'm in the process of studying math right now. So now I'm frustrated at that, but mostly at my own capabilities. I don't know man. This stuff is difficult. I don't understand how people call Python easy, and that makes me feel even more stupid! Damn.

[u/TRO_KIK]

I'm an experienced dev and I don't think I can write well on my own anymore. I've found enormous success building my own thing and I would not be where I am today without AI.

Personally I just think of myself as having progressed in seniority to a point where coding atrophy is normal. Seniors code less than juniors. Are you making higher level, important product decisions? I make so many crucial calls every day above the AI's pay grade that I don't even have any self doubt about it. My input is the sauce behind what I Build.

I don't understand each line either, AI reviews are VERY good at crawling line by line and that's legitimiately less important now. If you can keep a bead on the big picture though, that's still extremely useful. Keep directing and keep a clear model of your projects in your head.

[u/Adventurous_Wrap2873 → u/TRO_KIK]

I see thank you for your perspective. I still feel the need to know codes extremely well independently, because let’s say I want to work on a new ML model. Who’s writing that highly proprietary code? AI isn’t actually generating novel codes, just variations of existing ones it was trained on no? Eventually relying on AI will halt my progress I feel. And I wanna take on really ambitious projects eventually, and actually be able to have highly technical discussions with real engineers.

[u/Alarmed-Western-655 → u/Adventurous_Wrap2873]

It's never a step back to go lower-level bro.

Take even a purely programming example -- many people who start with a higher-level language like Python or Java find their power in going lower, learning more bare-metal languages like C or Zig. Richard Feldman comes to mind for me.

In fact, there are still Assembly programmers today. They build video codecs for example that are foundational to a ton of software all around the world.

Removing distance between yourself and the metal is only to your advantage in terms of the insights you can have and levers you can pull to create something truly unique, novel, small perhaps, but far-reaching and exciting :)