Your article highlights a fascinating tension about why we build things. If your joy comes purely from the act of writing code, your work never even needs to leave your room. But if you also seek community recognition—which is a completely valid and beautiful motivation—watching someone instantly achieve the same result via AI will naturally kill your enthusiasm.

Most of us fall somewhere in the middle. The healthiest approach is probably to embrace both: use vibecoding to rapidly ship great results, but treat manual coding as a purely aesthetic pursuit, much like writing poetry. There's really no difference between crafting code and painting, other than the lack of a physical medium.

I firmly believe that one day, beautifully hand-written code will be celebrated as a true, albeit niche, work of art.

You are missing a very important thing here. AI-written slop cannot be "genuinely useful". It's always a buggy mess that no sane person would ever run on their machine (especially old and rare one). When building a tool yourself you're putting your knowledge and expertise into it. These are the things that create trust and that make your tool inherently better than whatever vibecoded slop you can think of.