Can AI do it faster? Yes, but that’s not the point. The point is having fun.
The analogy I keep going to in my mind is chess. A computer can play chess on my behalf, or I can play chess myself, but only one is fun.
For now, do what interests you in a way that interests you.
Whether its martial arts or writing assembly or vibe coding a mobile app if you approach it like that you are going to succeed.
I get what this post is talking about. I'm just having fun, that comes in a lot of different flavours. I can try a lot more ideas out, that's fun. I can quickly learn if an idea won't work, sometimes that can be disappointing but at the same time learning why it won't work can be quite fun. When the AI utterly fails to do something it lets me develop an idea in my mind about the strengths and weaknesses of the models. Oftentimes the failures are not just fun but outright hilarious. I enjoy seeing models fail sometimes because they reveal an assumption that I have internallsed to the point of being unaware of it's presence. It reveals to me something about myself when something I didn't feel worth mentioning is actually quite important to communicate. Some of the failures are outright hilarious.
I do find it a bit tiring to use AI for long periods, because lazy thinking produces poor results. You have to maintain a clear idea of what it is you are trying to do. Quite often an idea can seem simple in your head because you have glossed over a number of complicating details. I find it a challenge to keep mind at a level where you are aware of these things before you request an AI to make something intrinsically flawed.
I don't have a problem doing things without AI just for fun either. I make animated images in a tiny stack machine bytecode. I do game jams, and code golfing, like dweets.
I also enjoy playing chess, computers pased my ability to play chess a long way back. I don't mind playing even when I know a computer can do better.
Unless you are the best in the world at a thing, there's always someone who could do it better, every attempt to do the best thing ever in a field will fail. On the other hand you can try and do better that what you yourself have done. Even then that's just the target to reach for. The real goal is to enjoy the reaching. It's the challenge at the limits that is fun, not the success or failure of the end result.
All of the fighting with the LLM to refine the results sounds tiresome. No thanks.
If it's fun for you, or it unblocks you, or whatever... Go for it. But it doesn't sound fun for me, so nope. I'll keep banging on rocks to write programs until that's not fun anymore. :p