What's real is that you'll be left behind if you keep hiding your head in the sand.
These days, programmer space is filled with elaborate, heartfelt examples of why “vibe coding” is bad. All my feeds are full of angry, honest pleas to return to the craftsmanship of solid, old-fashioned programming. Brethren, please. Stop freaking out for one moment.
Vibe coders aren’t real. They cannot hurt you.
Don’t believe me? Let’s try a thing.
Do you remember prompt engineering? It was but a couple of years ago, when big consultancy firms said they would stop hiring programmers in favour of prompt engineers. No? You don’t? How about Intellisense? Remember but a couple of decades ago, when you all hated that new tech because it would lead to “soft” programmers who didn’t remember the entire API of every framework they used? No?
Do you at least remember when we all died Ebola? No?
You didn’t die of Ebola. You all use Intellisense these days. You can’t name a single real human being with the title of “prompt engineer” in any company in the world. All those things were a product of the mass hysteria that follows all seismic shifts in the world.
Except for the Ebola thing. I’m not sure what the problem with that was. Slow news cycle, perhaps.
This is the age of LLMs, agents, and “AI”. It brings another seismic shift to every industry in the world. It’s the spectator sport of the day. You must have an opinion about it, or you aren’t worth much, and Vibe Coders are the latest boogeyman that programmers rail against so passionately. It’s just so adorable, really. But you disappoint me, because you should know better.
You see, I never truly achieved the ascetic dedication required to become a thoroughbred programmer. I was impure, way too interested in getting a girlfriend. But I have been working in software development, and have led teams of software developers, for a depressingly long time.
I know what makes you tick, including your ticks. I know that at the core of your being is a puzzle master, problem-solving maniac that knows no rest until issues are completely disassembled, organized by size, sorted by colour next to your other vict.. accomplishments.
Writers, artists, I understand why they freak out when faced with a mindless replication machine that can copy their work. But you? You, dear programmers, should be laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Don’t believe me? Let’s try a thing.
How many interns at any of your jobs could produce code without constant hand-holding? How much of that code was actually worth something in the grand scheme of actually making a complex application work?
A “vibe coder” is someone with no experience in application architecture who codes with an AI who has the precise skillset of an enthusiastic intern who doesn’t remember what you told them an hour ago. I dare you to challenge the accuracy of that statement.
How many of you lost jobs to a “vibe coding” department? How many of you actually had to unravel a complete database meltdown caused by a vibe coding accident? Not a single one of you.
That’s because vibe coders are not what’s really scaring you. What’s terrifying you is the threat of irrelevance, waves of change, and having to come up with another set of excuses to keep being allowed to code in Vim.
You are not wrong. The future is uncertain. It also is in your hands right now. How about, just as a thought experiment, just to indulge an old fool, you try a thought experiment?
Instead of railing against LLM-assisted coding, why don’t you try it out? You will see that, on average, it is a lot less irritating than the average intern. You will see that, on average, it can cut down the production of your boilerplate code dramatically. You will see that, on a good day, it can help you write basic, well-defined functions with no more than two lines of text.
You will find that maybe, just maybe, adding 5% vibe coding of your workflow will make your professional life better. And when your bosses come along and ask you how to make your work more “agentic”, you can tell them you are already fully agentic.
Vibe coding is just a shadow on the wall right now, and it’s being cast by an avalanche of technological innovation that you should be ready for, because it’s already here. Being caught unprepared, or against it, it will just hurt your future prospects.
I promise you it doesn’t hurt. And that I’ll only mock you a little when it turns out that you did like it after all.