I think it depends on what you are doing the side project for.
Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how.
Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code.
I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...).
But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.
Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how.
Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code.
I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...).
But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.