With AI, Is It Worth It Anymore?

"Is it worth writing blogs anymore?", This is the literal question that came to mind as I started to write this very blog. Not only that, just yesterday in the middle of a coding session, I Googled "Is it worth learning to code anymore?" and sure enough, AI had an answer to that question. The cherry on top is that I read its answer, then scrolled further to see if I could find some links to information written by humans. Nothing was as clear and concise as I wanted it to be in that moment though, so I returned to what I was doing. Fortunately (or unfortunately I guess, idk), the AI, not a human, convinced me that I should keep going.

My First Time Vibe Coding

I've recently started working on a new app. I started from scratch using the React Native template. Immediately, I began trying to prompt my way to what I wanted the app to look like using the GitHub Co-pilot GPT-5 mini model in Visual Studio Code. One of the first things I asked it to do was create a list of amenities, since my app will be based around this. It did this fairly well and added some style to the list items. I thought to myself, "Ok, that wasn't too bad. The list items look pretty nice and are spaced out well." So I continued, asking it to now create an Add Amenity button. It proceeded to do so and completed the task. I looked at the iPhone simulation screen and sure enough the button was there and had a nice size and color.

However, as I started reading the code it generated, I was horrified. For one, instead of making a component for each of the list items, the AI hard coded the list items onto the screen. They weren't able to be easily modified or re-used on another screen if I decided to later. As for the button, AI decided to hard code that onto the screen as well and have it stay in place among the list items as new items were added. These are just a few issues I had within the first few minutes of using AI to completely code the app itself. I took over from there.

My Takeaways

To me, it is still worth writing code because AI isn't great at directly writing code, especially for an extensive project like an app. It would suck to have vibe coded for 5 or 6 hours and then go back and try to learn what the code did. I probably wouldn't even get that far before encountering an AI generated error that AI wouldn't be able to solve. I will say however, that it has been good as a tool to ask coding questions and for quick explanations of code. Often times, the code that it does write is new to me and I learn from what it wrote.

As for if it is still worth it to write blogs, I guess this blog may be a good test for that. So far, none of my blog material has been generated by AI. My fear is that if I start using AI for writing, then I may slowly lose my voice and personality in my writing. Also, I could start to forget how to write, and all the things that come with that like how to gather and organize my own thoughts, how to come up with unique information, etc. But that is a topic for another time.

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