I like building things. Learning programming and coding at an early age gave me the ability to build things and express myself. It almost felt like a superpower, at least to me. It's also a great problem-solving exercise that keeps my brain engaged. And it's incredibly satisfying to see something you've built actually work.
So I've spent most of my life building and rebuilding things. Projects, websites, tools.
But that changed drastically a few months ago when I started using coding agents.
Now I build something almost every day. They've given me the ability to create my own bespoke software for almost any problem I have, and I do exactly that. It's also aggravated my already messed up instant-gratification problem.
At one point I thought about sharing everything I built on the blog. I've dropped that idea for now.
I've built 50+ projects. Telegram bots. Cloudflare Workers for specific use cases, like tracking Amazon and Flipkart prices. A bookmark organizer. Flashcards and quiz apps. An expense tracker that uses Google Sheets as the backend. A dictionary. And dozens of other little tools.
Basically anything I want to create, or whatever my ADHD brain decides is the most important thing to build that day.
The funny thing is, I hardly use most of them.
Most of these projects were built on a whim. One morning I'd wake up thinking, "I need a better way to read Reddit posts," spend an hour with Claude, have a working tool by lunch, use it for three days, and then never open it again.
And that's where I started feeling like an imposter.
I don't really feel comfortable sharing these things with the world because I didn't actually write most of the code. I guided an AI to build it for me. It feels like cheating. They don't really feel like mine.
I've also realized that AI-generated code isn't that smart, especially when it comes to security. Unless I manually review it, I don't trust it enough to handle other people's data. And because I've built so many things, it's just not realistic for me to properly maintain all of them.
A few days ago I came across a bunch of vibe-coded UPSC websites. Since anyone can make a web app now, everyone is making web apps. People with little to no understanding of web security are building apps that handle real user data.
I was able to break into most of those sites with very little effort. In some cases I could access data that was supposed to be hidden. In others I found entire user databases, including passwords. One idiot had left his Supabase configuration commented out in the frontend.
It's beyond stupid how people with almost no understanding of security are deploying apps for other people to use. It's like giving a loaded gun to a child.
Even though I've built a lot of useful things, most of it still feels like slop to me. Because, honestly, most of it is. At least I have my own design language, so my websites don't immediately scream "AI-generated." But the internet is flooded with the same default AI aesthetic. You can almost always tell when a website was built with Claude.
The biggest thing AI has taken away, though, is the fun.
Where's the problem solving? Where's the attention to detail? Where's the brain engagement? Any idiot with two brain cells can write a prompt. Better yet, ask another LLM to write a better prompt. There’s no such thing as “prompt-engineer”. You are engineer of nothing.
The difficult part isn't building anymore. Building has become almost free.
All of this has made me rethink my excitement for coding agents. They've genuinely saved me a couple of times. For example, they helped me untangle the Google Photos Takeout metadata mess, something I probably wouldn't have bothered doing manually.
But for every genuinely useful project, there are ten others that exist simply because I could make them. That's the real problem. Coding agents have removed almost all the friction from building, and for someone as impulsive as me, that's probably the worst possible thing they could have done.