It doesn't matter, neither of those scenarios makes the effort impressive in this case. The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though. Effort does.

> The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though.

Then "impressive" shouldn't even be the benchmark. If someone gifted me $10K, I'm not going to care if they earned it in a competition or won it in a lottery. Value is value. I'm gratefully accepting it and not being snobby about it. I couldn't care less about how "impressive" anything is if it's useful to me.

This is the myth of the Protestant work ethic; that effort matters, not outcome.

This is what I think a lot of the people who advocate for 'AI generated images being art' don't get. There's no effort or intentionality into what's being created; it has the look and appearance of 'polished art' (that breaks down when you look closer) but behind it is nothing.

It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.