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Comment by ed_elliott_asc | Hacker News Reader

I don’t get this feeling, I feel like I’ve achieved so much more than I have ever achieved, everything is polished and I’m happy with it.

I’m still developing, I’m just doing more than I ever did by directing Codex.

The way I see it is the same as I saw the leap from writing code in a text editor, to using an ide with intellisense, to using the jetbrains ide’s, to using mcp’s, to now directing AI - at all of those steps I wrote code, each step less and less but still it has the same output which is it is my work - even writing in a text editor I wrote less Java (until enterprise architects got involved :) ) than C++, and than assembly.

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You don't get it because for you destination is more important than the journey. And it is fine. Probably.

For me and (likely) for OP as well it is the opposite. Result is meaningless without the process. I can't take fruits of my labor (whichever labor it can be) to the grave, and if you remove the process of growing and picking said fruits, then where is "you" in that? Did you really "achieved" anything? Or whatever you wished for just magically appeared in front of you with little effort from your side?

Where is the fun of renting a helicopter that would carefully put you onto mountain's summit and pick you up 5 minutes later?

With little effort?

I am working tirelessly and often long nights, on top of a day job.

My effort has shifted to QA testing, reviewing UI designs, and delegating the agents on the implementation.

I will consider it an achievement if I manage to publish a successful app.

Where is the "me" in that? I am guiding the design of every screen and feature the way I would like it to be.

On top of that I make technical decisions on how it is implemented.

Apart from the loads of QA work I will have to handle the business side as well.

As of now it's hardly as trivial and effortless as some make it out to be.

Yes, I no longer write the code, and sometimes it feels frustrating that any teenager without experience could perhaps build a similarly good app soon.

Overall I'm still happy I can now build much larger and better apps and realistically publish them in my free time, for a chance to make serious money.

>Where is the "me" in that? I am guiding the design of every screen and feature the way I would like it to be.

I disagree. I think you're actually giving up so many little decisions. You are delegating decisions to agents all the time. In place of your slow but still personal decisions, you are ok with decisions that might be similar to what the LLM believes to be the best average, or the best solution based on what limited experience of the world they were trained on. The Ai devil for me is in these details.

That is probably fine for a lot of use-cases, but it's still removing your own agency from the process itself willfully, and yet still taking all of the merit. And to me that makes the final thing less of a byproduct of you and your experiences.

I am not black and white on this, and there are different degrees to the issue. But I just cannot accept this approach that trades the nature of the output for the quantity of it.

And frankly, a lot of other people feel the same. Check the data on the explosion of apps and how little they are maintained or picked up by final users.

I expect those are low quality apps churned out with minimal effort.

For the design of my app, I try to imitate the UX of Apple's first party apps.

I checked the competitors, and what is in the AppStore looks like it was built in 2015, and only updated to add Ads and subscriptions. Surprisingly, I did not even see vibe coded apps for my use case.

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