is AI fast or good?

Published on: 8/10/2026

better or faster?

i’ve been noticing something for a while now, which is pretty obvious: ai is getting better than me at coding now. and what do i mean in this context? am i shit at coding stuff and just offload my brain to the AI? not necessarily…

my issue is basically - i am Slow. slow at understanding a codebase, slow at learning a language, slow at reading documentation, slow at Coding. and that’s what AI is better than me at.

shit is Fast. fast at understanding a codebase or what I want. but the issue now is that i want to learn as well! and just being a fucking approve changes and skim some code / remove comments isn’t fucking fun at all, it’s just exhausting because it’s mindnumbing

i’m just more concerned at how I can balance being productive (what does productive mean in this sense?) and being productive also depends on the context i’m coding in to me.

what contexts should i not use it?

is it acceptable if i vibe code a hackathon as long as i kinda get the features i need done? sure… but that takes out the fun of suffering and trying to set up a dev environment and learning shit myself. i recently even went to one where i entirely vibecoded the thing myself and we pitched really well, managed to get 2nd. and it’s really not that technically impressive, which made me feel like a real.. fraud?

is it acceptable to do it at work, where I basically have to submit stuff if not i fear falling behind / not matching up to people’s expectations of me… I admit myself that when i do something im usually learning it for the first time, and that’s what being younger than others makes me afraid of.

it makes me afraid that i am inexperienced and can’t match up to them, so i look at this big shiny claude code TUI staring at me which i’ve used a few times for PRs and it Blazes through Python and does it better than I can ever. but that doesn’t make me good at my work, it’s some short term profit trading for long term getting good at actual coding, actual system design understanding which i enjoy. but i’m Slow at it. and that’s the issue

the one thing that I’ve never ever used AI for is making something for my personal passion, be it a website or a tool i want to use for myself (depends, i find myself slipping more for it now which made me scared and prompted me to write a blog about initially) and I hope it stays that way. it’s fine if i just gpt stuff about syntax or whatever, but i do not ever want it to replace me in making decisions on the actual design of the code, which i have started to learn as i become employed longer and longer

what now??

tbh i dunno i haven’t exactly figured all of this out yet, i don’t wanna be an elitist or like a purist who’s all like “use linux use C only and ignore those woke rust users!” and blindly hate on things that i don’t really 100% understand yet. like it’s the same kind of “logic” in that sense.

i guess my general rule of thumb for now is if it’s something i care about or actually wanna learn i’m not even gonna open up copilot, at most just regular websites so that i have to use my brain, even if i’m slow. or maybe it’s because i’m slow?

and in the cases where i am in a time crunch, sure why not. but at least i should know if it’s following a particular code structure or design that the current codebase is using instead of just tabbing and saying LGTM