Like many of us who stumbled and “played” with AI, with many LLM providers around, it is hard to miss — almost everything is at your fingertips. AI already has its place with many users: ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, anything on the market. Some know what they’re doing, some don’t.
At first I was aimlessly using AI — generating funny images, manipulating images with prompts, and other things like refining article posts or Confluence entries.
After a while I noticed that the models are good at helping me with my struggle in building software — software that I can actually use.
I’ve known the term “vibe coding” for some time. I thought it was silly, but after getting to know it, understanding the workflow, and knowing how to build a product, it’s not that bad. I used to build stuff on my own, develop it from the ground up. Preparing a project was cumbersome — decisions on what technology to use, whether it will last long-term, that kind of cognitive load. I know how to build software, I know a thing or two about building a good product, but that cognitive load, the context switching that can hurt you, and all the tasks that need managerial skills rather than code itself, made me “avoid” building software.
Since I know how to think like a system — or rather, practice Systems Thinking — this engineer’s brain can’t help it when I see what AI can do, how it can help me build stuff that I might use or not use. Build software that’s specific to my company, or just for fun. I can do that right now, with the help of AI or agents I deploy to build stuff.
That preparation — decision-making for the tech stack, the language, the database, frontend, backend, everything — I can delegate those decisions to an AI code assistant. They can help me out, even with a language I’m not familiar with, like TypeScript for instance.
I can focus on defining and refining what product I need to build, create the spec in a document, let the AI read it, and prepare what I need within the spec. Let the AI write the PRD, build based on that, refine, build, refine, repeat.
With my current responsibilities — managing people more than code — and with the little time I have, it’s such a breath of fresh air. I’ve suddenly rediscovered my passion for software engineering — through AI.