Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand

But then I started to feel overwhelmed by the amount of code and the fact that coding manually started to come harder.

I ended up just cancelling my sub and going back to the old ways. Side projects are fine to take extra time as they are my hobby for me.

Maybe I'm outing myself as being too old and cynical, but at a certain point, most of most of the projects I work on are effectively the same exact setup but with just enough differences from one another than reusing previous work is less efficient than just building things from scratch. In these cases, vibe coding let's me get past the boring, repetitive portion for building a project so that I can get to the last 20% quicker which is where the actual interesting parts occur.

Even then, the OP also sounds like someone with more time on their hands than they know what to do with. If I didn't have a full-time job, a family, other non-coding hobbies, etc., then maybe I'd be more inclined to just slow things down and take my time coding up and idea even if I could vibe code it. I can see such a practice as enjoyable, like doing the Sunday crossword puzzle. But the reality is that I do not have that time, and I've existed as an engineer long enough to know that you simply will never have the time to even start a project, let alone make any significant progress, if you're not really invested in it.

So, again, vibe coding has changed that: I can spin up a prototype of a project from my phone with little effort or time commitment. I can check it out, see how it works, and decide if I want to continue investing time and energy into it. Usually, I don't. And that's fine. I'm not sure why the OP paints that pattern as something negative when, to me, it's a good thing: I know that if I didn't vibe code those ideas and, instead, squeezed in the time to build it myself, I would have ended up at the same point. With vibe coding, I can skip that work (which, again, isn't particularly enjoyable or interesting) and jump straight to the point where I'm basically satisfied with what I have and can move on.

Before LLMs, this was a pretty brutal process. You have to be picky with what you're investing time into, and often it simply wasn't worth the time. Again, as a beginner, it WAS worth the time because I'll have often learned a ton during the process. As someone who has been doing this a while, that is no longer the case.

So I guess I don't necessarily disagree with the OP in general (coding by hand CAN be fun), but I don't agree with the assertion that "you build something if, and only if, you code it." I build things all the time in abstract ways which don't involve any coding. Sometimes it's managing other humans who do the actual coding, while I still feel I'm building the end result. Sometimes it's working with others on projects which don't even involve coding. Sometimes it's just evaluating a quick vibe coded prototype. It's still building something, and it's still satisfying.