Vibe Coding Turned Me into a Mouse on a Wheel: How I Fixed It

As an electrical engineer, I always enjoyed dabbling in programming, but comfortably outsourced it once an implementation needed real solutions. Then AI popped up and started making software accessible. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini CLI, all these tools lived in my projects. I could collaborate with them, and I was having a blast innovating and creating features! I really enjoyed solving the problems and learning about software as I did side project after side project. I scaffolded my own l