Is it really my project if AI wrote it?

I’m starting a new project, and I’m struggling with how much of it I should be writing by hand. I feel like a fraud if I use agentic engineering to develop it, but also that’s where the world is going. I think I’m afraid that people will view me as one of the people who vibe-codes a project in a couple prompts and then claims the work as their own. Part of this is deciding to push past the fear of other people’s opinions and just do it. I can choose to build this with care, while also learning the skills that seem to be the next abstraction layer for software engineers. I imagine it must have been pretty intimidating surrendering control to compilers and moving up the stack to higher level languages, so I can take some comfort that this dissonance is a feeling others have felt in the past & made it out the other side.

As a frustrating bonus, I don’t feel like I have time to allow myself to write a new project by hand. There is so much stuff being released, and the pace of AI is blistering, especially when I look at the prolific people who let down their internal guardrails and build like crazy. It feels like I HAVE to choose to develop this new project with AI so I can learn the skills. The more I see being released, I feel this impending rush that I’m not moving fast enough, that each new thing being created is something that I can’t be the one to make. I don’t feel smart enough to make really useful things, so if people nab all the low-hanging fruit, I’m donezo. That’s a zero-sum mentality on top of a scarcity mindset, neither of which feel like a good way to approach AI. We’re in a time of churn, there are no standardized best practices yet, which means there are no wrong ways to be learning right now. Everyone is still figuring things out, and I want that to fill me with hope. Whenever I feel this overwhelming dread, I want to try to toggle myself into curiosity mode instead.

I think I also need a mindset shift in what I consider effort. As it stands, if I didn’t write code by hand and have to struggle & flex my brain muscles, it doesn’t feel like I earned the right to say I built a project. Someone said it well when they compared AI to some sort of slot machine or TikTok, if I use them wrong I feel quite hollow. That’s on me though, because I don’t look at all the cool things Simon Willison is putting out and think “oh he didn’t really build them”. I look to him as one example of the prolific creators I want to emulate.

Update 3/26/2026: Excellent insights (from the creator of an agent framework, so it’s not just cope!) - Thoughts on slowing the fuck down | Mario Zechner . Big one: “And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you’re actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don’t need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code…..Learning to say no is a feature in itself.”