The amount people are spending is mind boggling to me,

Its relative, is it not? Think about it ... A company pays what? 3 to 5k for somebody per month. Spending $200 per month, on something that gets, ... lets say 25% more productivity out of somebody is a bargain.

It just hurts more, if you are maybe a self employed dev, and you see that money directly going from your account ;)

the only way I can see this happening is if its a constant "No thats wrong, rewrite it" loop rather than having the knowledge and experience to specify what you need correctly on the first go.

The problem is that most LLMs get worse if they need to work on existing code. Create a plan, let it create brand new code and often the result in the first try is good. At worst you update the plan, and let it start from zero again.

But the moment you have it edit existing code, and the more context it needs, the more often you see new files being created that are not needed, incorrect code references, deleting critical code by itself or just bad code.

The more you vibe code, the worst it gets as your codebase grows and the context window needs to be bigger. Maybe its me but you need to really structure your project almost to fit LLM's ways of working, to even mitigate this. No single style.css file that is 4000 lines, because the LLm is going to do funky stuff.

If you work in the old way, like requests per function or limited to a independent shorter file (max 1000 lines), it tends to do good jobs.

But ironically, using something like CoPilot, you actually get more or less punished by doing small requests (each = premium request) vs one big Agent task that may do dozens of actions (under a single premium request).