Try to code blindly with AI and you'll waste more tokens because you don't have any idea on what you do, so you're dependant to AI solutions that often misleading and leading to "oh sorry, I implemented this while there's a simpler method, deleting the implementation and implementing the new implementation strategy".

I spent 4 years hand coding a real time google docs competitor from the ground up with no libs (and got it working very nicely).

I found that easier to do than code up a production grade app with AI, mainly because hand coding was all easily provable end-to-end.

That's why I posted this poll, I was curious if others think it is a real skill.

Without any additional harness SKILLs, you’re not going to get something as good as a human will create - for larger/full applications, scripts and script sized apps is ok. Self promotion time: I have been working hard on this problem for a long time and have come up with a plugin to help. Currently just for Claude Code, but Codex and OpenCode versions are in the works. Its not necessarily going to speed up development, but the goal is to produce usable applications, not slop. I am using it to build my own apps, so it is under heavy active development. It also has a built in Kanban board for managing tasks.

Coder-Fleet: https://github.com/rzem-ai/coder-fleet

There is skill involved in doing anything well.

AI coding, at the level of ordinary scripts, generally doesn’t require much special skill. Things like Excel automation, for example. But building an entire program does require a certain kind of skill.