> I’m writing some (for me) seriously advanced software that would have taken me months to write, in weeks, using Claude and ChatGPT.

Do you understand the code?

What was the speed up from months to weeks? You just didn't know what to type? Or you didn't know the problem domain? Or you found it hard to 'start' and the AI writing boiler plate gave you motivation?

In my experience with AI tools, it only really helps with ideation, most things it produces need heavy tweaking - to the point that there is no time savings. It's probably a net negative because I am spending all of my time thinking how to explain things to a dumb computer, rather than thinking about how to solve the problem.

Yes, I understand it very well.

The main advantage is I can run it in parallel and iterate often.

The speed up is also avoiding looking up reference manuals endlessly just to produce some Qt Widgets.

I’m a fairly recent convert, I only started “vibe coding” a couple of months ago, after hearing how good Opus was. I had been a skeptic until then.

I am a decentralist by nature and prefer open standards and self hosting. I’ve had my own *nix servers since I was twelve (nearing forty) so it really pains me to admit how good it is to use these corporate products.

I am not a programmer by trade. I use it to write software for my domain of expertise. The value of what I am creating is enormous.

Both ChatGPT and Claude produce good code, in my opinion.