AI Made Me Write Less Code — and Think More About Engineering

The useful part

Eventually I started thinking: why am I still maintaining a spreadsheet for something this simple? I had wanted to build a small workout tracker for a while, but there was one thing holding me back: frontend development isn't my strongest area. Instead, I wanted to remain involved in the engineering decisions at every stage.

How it works

• I had been tracking my workouts in Google Sheets for quite some time.
• It is incredibly impressive how quickly you can get something working.
• The AI might decide: how the application should be structured how components should look how state should be managed how APIs should be designed which libraries should be introduced how different pieces...
• If anything, I spent more time thinking about requirements, specifications, architecture, trade-offs, reviewing changes, testing, and deployment.
• The experiment: AI-assisted development, not vibe coding I've experimented with vibe coding before.

What to take from it

I also found myself feeling that the implementation was slowly moving out of my control.

Details worth keeping

So I decided to turn the project into an experiment. About 99% of the code in the application was written by AI. I didn't feel like I had outsourced the engineering.