📝 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.