I'm debating using LLMs for my side projects. Does using one remove the "soul" of my project? On the other hand, a friend is actually making progress with his side app _because_ he's able to lean on the LLM after a full day's worth of working the day job. I might be able to actually do some of the things I've dreamed of and never had the capacity for. First world problems, I guess.

I've been doing exactly this now for a little while, and it breathed new life into my projects. It's been amazing, honestly. I was worried about the "soul" as well, especially for some projects where I got intimately deep in bit shifting and things, but realistically that project is now 100x more useful to me because it has a ton of features and even bug fixes that I never would have spent the time on before. I highly recommend it.

I think it depends on what you are doing the side project for.

Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how.

Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code.

I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...).

But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.