the middle ground nobody talks about is using AI for the boring infrastructure stuff (stripe integration, auth boilerplate, static site scaffolding) and writing the actual business logic yourself. i've shipped like 3 side projects this year using that approach and the code quality is fine because im not vibe coding the parts that actually matter

Yeah, people do forget how much of our codebases is already slop. Like, anything that's in a "boilerplate" or "scaffold" is probably code that a human shouldn't be spending time writing in the first place.