Show HN: I quit coding years ago. AI brought me back

My response is perhaps a bit raw, but so is the quote above.

Stop with the gate keeping. I've studied CS to understand coding, not to have some sort of pride to build "real software". Knowledge is a tool, nothing more, nothing less.

There are enough developers whose whole job it is to edit one button per week and not much more. And yes, there are also enough developers that actually apply their CS skills.

> but 99% of software engineers aren't working on toys in the first place

Go outside of your bubble. It's way more nuanced than that.

> I guess people who aren't software engineers don't realise that merely making a trivially basic website is not what software engineering is.

Moving goal posts. Always has been.

It's not that I fully disagree with you either. And I'm excited about your accomplishments. But just the way it reads... man...

I guess it hits me because I used to be disheartened by comments like this. It just feels so snarky as if I am never good enough.

The vibe is just "BUH BUH BUH and that's it." That's how it comes across.

And I've come to mature enough to realize I shouldn't feel disheartened. I've followed enough classes at VUSEC with all their rowhammer variations and x86-64 assignments to have felt a taste of what deep tech can be. And the thing is, it's just another skill. It doesn't matter if someone works on a web app or a deep game programming problem.

What matters (to me at least) that you feel the flow of it and you're going somewhere touching an audience. Maybe his particular calculator app has a better UX for some people. If that's the case, then his app is a win. If your game touches people, then that's a win. If you feel alive because you're doing complex stuff, then that's a win (in the style of "A Mathematician's Apology"). If you're doing complex stuff and you feel it's rough and you're reaching no one with it, it's neutral at best in my book (positive: you're building a skill, negative: no one is touched, not even you).

Who cares what the underlying technology is. What's important is usability.

Creating a polished, usable app is just so much work, and so much of it isn't fun at all (to me). There are a few key parts that are fun, but building an intuitive UI, logging, error handling, documentation, packaging, versioning, containerization, etc. is so tedious.

I'm bewildered when I read posts by the naysayers, because I'm sitting here building polished apps in a fraction of the time, and they work. At least much better than what I was able to build over a couple of weekends. They provide real value to me. And I'm still having fun building them.

I now vibe coded three apps, two of them web apps, in Rust, and I couldn't write a "Hello World" in Rust if you held a gun to my head. They look beautiful, are snappy, and it being Rust gives me a lot of confidence in its correctness (feel free to disagree here).

Of course I wouldn't vibe code in a serious production project, but I'd still use an AI agent, except I'd make sure I understand every line it puts out.