Vibe Coding is Creating a Generation of Unemployable Developers: Don’t build your career on shortcuts. Build it on skill, and you will become the developer that AI cannot replace.
sia.hackernoon.com
Once the bubble pops, Claude, OpenAI, etc will need to raise prices and/or tighten rate limits. I wouldn't want to be a "vibe coder" in that situation.
So does the same apply to mathematics and calculators? Tradespeople and power tools? Writers and spellcheck?
It’s a bloody tool, why are people so against it? The same crap happens whenever something new comes out ANYWHERE.
If my calculator was wrong 10% of the time, but always produced a result that "felt" correct, that would be worse than not using a calculator at all.
Same thing for power tools or spell check.
Okay, go hire an accountant who only knows how to use a calculator - no formal training. Should be fine, accounting is just maths and a calculator is a tool to do maths with.
And honestly, even this analogy is too generous, because at least to use a calculator you have to know what the symbols mean. Vibe coding doesn't even require that much.
Honestly, a calculator isnt even a fair comparison. A calculator can be reverse-engineered and proven to produce a certain output from a given input. Even scientists say AI is a black box. It cant be given any guarantees to what it will produce.
Well yeah. Lots of professions that used to exist just don't anymore because of that stuff, or at least only exist as a small niche where before they employed tons of people. Like "computer" used to be a job people had doing math by hand.
WTF this thread is wild. These people literally think 100% of dev jobs need full stack software architect level expertise and also that code can only have two states: correct or incorrect. LOL
That's a nice strawman you built there, but it's wrong. The issue is not that "every dev needs to be a senior dev to use AI" nor is it "code is binary: right or wrong" (🥁). The whole point of this article is that new developers are entering the industry but they're not building the skills that would eventually forge them into senior devs. They're relying on generative AI for the foundational work, even when assigned a learning exercise by a senior dev, without understanding the "why" behind the output of the LLM they used.
What matters is cost, not skill. If you want to get hired, be cheaper than AI.
In some contexts, perhaps. I assure you that skill will remain relevant when programming aircraft or nuclear reactors
Boeing doesn't even think aeronautic engineers are necessary for building aircraft, but I digress
I program in a custom built legacy code base built in basic. There is no way AI is taking this job. The code is filled with magic numbers that you just have to know what they do. I lose hair daily.
AI has already arrived in nuclear power plants. I don't expect aircraft design and control to be the big exception.
Yea and the invention of the camera was also not taking painters jobs since there remainl contexts where it’s relevant, right? No, actually most painting jobs before the camera consisted of just replicating reality and those were now gone.
Quite easy to be cheaper than the billion dollar investment that will coming crashing down in 6 months with huge losses when you need to quickly hire actual developers.
And dont get me wrong. I see the appeal. The non-tech savvy CEO is promised huge savings by big tech if they use AI instead of good developers.. However, in reality the product wont get shipped faster and the tech debt will increase ten-fold. The AI strat works if youre running a scam you expect to shit down quickly either way, so ig it makes sense why crypto bros and NFT lovers like it.
Unfortunately correct, I've seen this strategy work already. I wonder if it will end up being a veritable race to the wage floor for workers.
I've seen others go the "grass fed, free range, human made, artisan software" route as well, utterly opposing ai assistance.
At some point there must have somebody out there making sweaters and swearing up and down that machines could never do their job as well, but at the end of the day the employee who makes the shirt doesn't decide if their job will be automated. The boss cares about the economics and even if the product is inferior they will choose the cheaper option.
Correct. That's how our entire economy works, this is how every company survives and expands.
I mostly agree with the article, but this particular part stood out to me:
One of my biggest gripes with AI generated code has been the high volume of low-value comments - the type of high noise-to-signal stuff you just sort of have to remove.
# do an ls to list files in the current working directory ls ./* Calculates the levenshtein distance between two words * @param wordA: the first word to pass to the algorithm * @param wordB: the second word to pass to the algorithm */ def levenschteinDistance(wordA: String, wordB: String): Int = ...-- completely fucking pointless innit
A lot of AI comments are just restating the code to you. Explaining the “what” not “why”.
Which is fine for educational purposes. Not so much for actual production code.