State of the art AI can indeed code better than most programmers. I can get weeks of work done in a day with $100. I’ve been programming in multiple areas for 30 years.
I’m not saying that a noob can ask an AI to build Google and it will be done; But you’d better believe that an experienced programmer using AI will deliver weeks of high-quality work in a single day.
In this scenario, people with no experience are simply dead in the water. Things that took an experienced team months to build can now be done by a single guy in a few days, and there’s no way that won’t mess with employment.
If I was a young person I would be getting as far from software development as possible. Coding as a job is basically obsolete, people like you will just take time to accept it.
Someone find me a recording of writing a real application – not a “vibe coding demo” – using one of these magic tools. Let’s ignore the complexities of scale or data integrity, or even error handling. Write a simple asteroids clone or calculator app. Something that doesn’t need to reach outside its tiny box.
Build that in only an AI coding tool and see how long it takes to get a real product. (I get stuck here. So far, all demos end up halting before they are MVP, though they tend to get something faster than I could)
Afterwards, get a code review and fix any findings without breaking anything.
And here’s a catch: If you want to say AI codes better than humans, then a human is never allowed to modify the code directly. They can only prompt.
Show me that, and I might change my tune, but we’re nowhere close to it AFAIK, and I don’t see it ever happening. Until then, “AI coding” is at-best a way to reduce time spent writing small atomic functions that can be easily verified by a human, or maybe starting a function that a human fixes.
Things that took an experienced team months to build can now be done by a single guy in a few days…
I have yet to see this materialize outside of CEO townhalls or industry self-aggrandizement. If you’re an experienced programmer, can you go make me the demo I want and then review the code with a critical eye?
I’m not saying that a noob can ask an AI to build Google and it will be done; But you’d better believe that an experienced programmer using AI will deliver weeks of high-quality work in a single day.
And, I wonder, how does an intern or novice programmer become this experienced programmer if they never have to touch code‽ We’re headed to Idiocracy here, where the people who knew how to get shit done and why it worked eventually died off and there was no pipeline to replace them.
Until then… “vibe coding” is just smoke and will result in terrible things happening in a few years as banks and companies start inflicting terrible, cheap, AI code on us all.
Want to make tons of money? Go learn to be a security researcher. I’d be happy to be proved wrong.
I honestly don’t get what your asking. There already are loads of “vibe coded” software out there. The fact you don’t notice it, only makes my argument stronger.
For the last six months I have personally been working on pretty complex software project involving multiple user-facing frontends, a managing backoffice for admins and a backend/API in which not a single line of code has been written by a human. I can guarantee you that, in my 30 years of professionally developing software, this is the most rational, documented and test-covered codebase I have had the pleasure of working with.
You need to understand that most developers are, honestly, not very good. You can ask any dev who has ever worked consulting if they ever saw a good codebase, and most likely people will tell you that all they ever saw was spaggheti. You talk of “cheap and terrible AI code” as if the current “human code” was great, but you’d be surprised. Code, when all is said and done, is just a mean to an end. Users and stakeholders don’t give a fuck about how nice the code is, what they want is working features.
You also need to understand that I’m talking about agentic state of the art AIs that are not cheap, not copy/pasting from chatGPT. The company I work at has spent dozens of thousands on Cursor tokens for Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2, etc. in just the last few months.
Regarding “how will new devs become experienced”, yeah, I have no idea. The truth is that, right now, an experienced dev + a budget for AI tokens can be more productive than a room full of juniors. Those juniors also don’t learn shit, because they just go to chatGPT to get code and understand mostly nothing of what they’re doing. I don’t know how this will evolve.
Software will still be a thing, obviously; People will still be building software. But in the same way that you code without needing to know anything about the electronics of the machine, future programmers won’t need to know nothing about the syntax and rules of programming languages, that much seems obvious to me.
Programmers will turn into project managers, with AI doing the coding itself.
No, it won’t. Programming was and still is a professional job. If somehow corporations are able to throw resources at it to make this profession obsolete, this will be one of the last jobs which get replaced by machines. Hundreds of other jobs would be replaced before it. Corporations would have all the money with nothing to spend on.
If there isn’t a revolution to overthrow this “infinite growth” model now, there will be. It’s either the end of corporations, or humanity.
Even though we live in an utopia, burning all that energy to program isn’t sustainable on this earth. It’s a dead end for this so-called AI.
How can you see what’s going on and say this? Did you read the article?
Have you heard of Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, etc? Where is the equivalent to those tools for those other jobs that will be replaced first?
After plain text, code is probably the biggest share of training data. Github alone hosts billions of lines of open source code. Where is the same type of data for those other jobs?
State of the art AI can indeed code better than most programmers. I can get weeks of work done in a day with $100. I’ve been programming in multiple areas for 30 years.
I’m not saying that a noob can ask an AI to build Google and it will be done; But you’d better believe that an experienced programmer using AI will deliver weeks of high-quality work in a single day.
In this scenario, people with no experience are simply dead in the water. Things that took an experienced team months to build can now be done by a single guy in a few days, and there’s no way that won’t mess with employment.
If I was a young person I would be getting as far from software development as possible. Coding as a job is basically obsolete, people like you will just take time to accept it.
I keep asking, and have never seen one:
Someone find me a recording of writing a real application – not a “vibe coding demo” – using one of these magic tools. Let’s ignore the complexities of scale or data integrity, or even error handling. Write a simple asteroids clone or calculator app. Something that doesn’t need to reach outside its tiny box.
Build that in only an AI coding tool and see how long it takes to get a real product. (I get stuck here. So far, all demos end up halting before they are MVP, though they tend to get something faster than I could)
Afterwards, get a code review and fix any findings without breaking anything.
And here’s a catch: If you want to say AI codes better than humans, then a human is never allowed to modify the code directly. They can only prompt.
Show me that, and I might change my tune, but we’re nowhere close to it AFAIK, and I don’t see it ever happening. Until then, “AI coding” is at-best a way to reduce time spent writing small atomic functions that can be easily verified by a human, or maybe starting a function that a human fixes.
I have yet to see this materialize outside of CEO townhalls or industry self-aggrandizement. If you’re an experienced programmer, can you go make me the demo I want and then review the code with a critical eye?
And, I wonder, how does an intern or novice programmer become this experienced programmer if they never have to touch code‽ We’re headed to Idiocracy here, where the people who knew how to get shit done and why it worked eventually died off and there was no pipeline to replace them.
Until then… “vibe coding” is just smoke and will result in terrible things happening in a few years as banks and companies start inflicting terrible, cheap, AI code on us all.
Want to make tons of money? Go learn to be a security researcher. I’d be happy to be proved wrong.
I honestly don’t get what your asking. There already are loads of “vibe coded” software out there. The fact you don’t notice it, only makes my argument stronger.
For the last six months I have personally been working on pretty complex software project involving multiple user-facing frontends, a managing backoffice for admins and a backend/API in which not a single line of code has been written by a human. I can guarantee you that, in my 30 years of professionally developing software, this is the most rational, documented and test-covered codebase I have had the pleasure of working with.
You need to understand that most developers are, honestly, not very good. You can ask any dev who has ever worked consulting if they ever saw a good codebase, and most likely people will tell you that all they ever saw was spaggheti. You talk of “cheap and terrible AI code” as if the current “human code” was great, but you’d be surprised. Code, when all is said and done, is just a mean to an end. Users and stakeholders don’t give a fuck about how nice the code is, what they want is working features.
You also need to understand that I’m talking about agentic state of the art AIs that are not cheap, not copy/pasting from chatGPT. The company I work at has spent dozens of thousands on Cursor tokens for Claude Opus 4.5, GPT-5.2, etc. in just the last few months.
Regarding “how will new devs become experienced”, yeah, I have no idea. The truth is that, right now, an experienced dev + a budget for AI tokens can be more productive than a room full of juniors. Those juniors also don’t learn shit, because they just go to chatGPT to get code and understand mostly nothing of what they’re doing. I don’t know how this will evolve.
Software will still be a thing, obviously; People will still be building software. But in the same way that you code without needing to know anything about the electronics of the machine, future programmers won’t need to know nothing about the syntax and rules of programming languages, that much seems obvious to me.
Programmers will turn into project managers, with AI doing the coding itself.
No, it won’t. Programming was and still is a professional job. If somehow corporations are able to throw resources at it to make this profession obsolete, this will be one of the last jobs which get replaced by machines. Hundreds of other jobs would be replaced before it. Corporations would have all the money with nothing to spend on.
If there isn’t a revolution to overthrow this “infinite growth” model now, there will be. It’s either the end of corporations, or humanity.
Even though we live in an utopia, burning all that energy to program isn’t sustainable on this earth. It’s a dead end for this so-called AI.
How can you see what’s going on and say this? Did you read the article?
Have you heard of Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, etc? Where is the equivalent to those tools for those other jobs that will be replaced first?
After plain text, code is probably the biggest share of training data. Github alone hosts billions of lines of open source code. Where is the same type of data for those other jobs?