The Psychology of Building with AI

I was stuck for two days on a feature after Sonnet 3.7 almost one-shot it, but then I just couldn’t make it work. This morning I started from scratch and implemented the whole thing in 1 hour, the old-fashioned way.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Actually, just when I was about to hit “Post”, I had an observation.

The psychology of coding with AI is strange.

On one hand, you write (or say) prompts in English and you get many lines of code across multiple files. Sometimes it works with a single try. Magic. Sometimes you repeat this many times until it works. And sometimes it never works.
On one hand, you write (or say) prompts in English and you get many lines of code across multiple files. Sometimes it works with a single try. Magic. Sometimes you repeat this many times until it works. And sometimes it never works.

On the other hand, you need to write each line by hand, create multiple files, read the docs, switch to the browser window several times, back and forth, ugh…

The first one feels like gambling. We’re all suckers for “just one more try”. When it works, all the dopamine is released at once.
The second one, although tedious, is a nice & steady release. A flow state.

To me, that flow state is what real “vibe coding” is like.