Vibe coding

For more than a month now I've been actively vibe coding at work, mostly using Claude Opus. Since my duties don't let me focus on programming, the AI helps a lot. I tried vibe coding a personal project, without using the premium paid requests from my work subscription.

First I tried coding with my own API keys. In two or three requests Opus charged me 2 dollars. Then I tried GPT-5.2, where a million tokens a day are free; the free ones ran out fast and after that it started costing money, though maybe you could do about a dozen requests within that million.

In the end I tried GPT-4.1, which is included in the corporate subscription and has no extra charge. It got the job done, but made elementary mistakes, and fixing them took a lot of time, plus the code quality clearly came out mediocre, and it fixes problems very reluctantly, you have to dive in yourself and give instructions, and then the point of the AI disappears. It doesn't seem worth it, I'll try getting a Claude Pro subscription for a month and see how it goes, after all, I don't work on the pet project constantly, the mental resources for it aren't always there, though maybe the AI will let me do it regularly, since it requires fewer mental resources.

Overall, for now AI doesn't reach the level of an experienced developer who's immersed in the code and focused on it. It can't replace such people yet. But if at work you have to do support and management most of the time, AI lets you do coding tasks in parallel that you wouldn't do otherwise because of the distractions. The same goes for a personal project, which might not get enough attention after work.

Vibe coded a gallery: https://bigcats.org.ua/photos

I'd wanted to do it for a long time, but there were no resources, and then the AI did it in a day of giving instructions) It probably took even more time, but if I'd done it myself, I'd have needed full concentration to get it done that fast