I've been working on a side project for ~10 years (very intermittently) that involves a tricky combination of mathematics, classical AI algorithms, and programming language design, and I've gone though this very slow but rewarding journey to work out how all of the pieces should fit together properly.

In the last year or so I've been able to prototype it and accelerate the development quite significantly using Claude and pals, and now it is very close to a finished product. One one hand there's no doubt in my mind that the LLM tools can make this sort of thing faster and let you churn through ideas until you find the right ones, but on the other hand, if I hadn't had that slow burn of mostly just thinking about it conceptually for 10 years, I would have ended up vibe coding a much worse product.

10 years of thinking before shipping is actually the move. The AI just becomes a power tool — useless if you don't know what you're building, unstoppable if you do