I agree with the side-project thing, where the code is only incidental to working on the real project. I recently wanted to organize thousands of photos my family had taken over decades and sprawled on a network drive, and in 5 minutes vibe-coded a script to recursively scan, de-dupe, rename with datetime and hash, and organize by camera from the EXIF data.

I could have written it myself in a few hours, with the Python standard docs open on one monitor and coding and debugging on the other etc, but my project was "organize my photos" not "write a photo organizing app". However, often I do side projects to improve my skills, and using an AI is antithetical to that goal.