> I'm a 100% vibe-coder. AI/CS is not my field. I've made plenty of neat apps that are useful to me.

This describes me pretty well too, though I do have a tiny bit of programming experience. I wrote maybe 5000 lines of code unassisted between 1995-2024. I didn't enjoy it for the most part, nor did I ever feel I was particularly good at it. On the more complex stuff I made, it might take several weeks of effort to produce a couple hundred lines of working code.

Flash forward to 2025 and I co-wrote (with LLMs) a genuinely useful piece of back office code to automate a logistics problem I was previously solving via a manual process in a spreadsheet. It would hardly be difficult for most people here to write this program, its just making some API calls, doing basic arithmetic, and displaying the results in a TUI. But I took a crack at it several times on my own and unfortunately between the API documentation being crap and my own lack of experience, I never got to the point where I could even make a single API call. LLMs got me over that hump and greatly assisted with writing the rest of the codebase, though I did write some of it by hand and worked through some debugging to solve issues in edge cases. Unlike OP, I do think I reasonably well understand what >90% of the code is doing.

> This isn't a 20% more productive feeling. It's productivity beyond what I will ever do on my own, given this is not my field.

So yeah, to the people here saying the above sentiment is BS - its not. For people who have never worked in programming or even in tech, these tools can be immensely useful.