Programmers are no longer needed!

"No longer needed" is probably never going to happen, but IMO needed by fewer companies is inevitable. I see "vibe coding" as an extension to those website builders like Squarespace, definitely not suitable for a large website or a company whose entire business model is software and/or web based services, but good enough that the owner of a small, non-tech company who just happens to need a website or simple app can do it themselves instead of paying someone on Fiverr or something to do it. Unfortunately that means the options for new developers looking for easy experience building jobs that could eventually help them land a better paying position will be even more limited than it is now.

I remember being taught Model-driven development using Eclipse as part of the software engineering study back in the early 2000's. Even as a student it was painfully obvious that you'd spend an awful lot of time trying to work around annoying limitations in whatever tool was used, rather than just writing the code yourself. The parallel to vibe-coding seems rather obvious.

In order to replace programmers with vibe coding, stakeholders would need to be able to describe their requirements accurately.

And then they'd need to be able to verify that the code actually meets these requirements. That might even necessitate specifying these requirements in some sort of a formal language...
- No! They don't want a formalised language. They'd much rather explain and re-explain in English, then repeatedly correct the mistakes the clanker inevitably makes. And spend at least the same amount of time as a skilled programmer would.
  But I get why managers think that skilled labour can easily be replaced with LLMs. Their jobs of writing emails and occasionally creating presentations, that may or may not match information they received from more skilled personnel, can absolutely be done by an LLM.

What, no COBOL? No 5GL?

But who programs the ai programs?

Ai programs of course 🙄 /s
- You're being sarcastic but surely you know that really is the presumed eventuality for a lot of people who have fallen for the hype. "AI will become smarter than humans and so will be able to create better AI." So if you believe that, we're currently still bootstrapping the AI, but it will eventually be able to create the next iteration of AI without needing us.
  I don't believe that of course.

Now, hold on a minute. I get what you're doing and I like it, but I don't think those first 2 examples work.

Visual programming is programming. Were they really ever touted as not requiring programmers? I would think it's just marketed as more intuitive and easier to use for certain applications, but users are still referred to as programmers. Let me know if I'm wrong. Side note: my first programming language was LabVIEW, a visual programming language, which I used in high school to program our robot for FRC. It is, for all intents and purposes, a fully-fledged programming language and requires a programmer to create code for it.

MDA, honestly I don't know much about it, but from the description in the image it sounds like it still requires someone to "write a universal model"... did they try to claim that that someone would not be a programmer?

Honestly for visual programming scratch is really great to get kids or even adults to learn scratch, since it's basically the exact same thing, just easier since you don't have to worry about syntax.
Stuff like the unity block system is also extremely powerful, and lets designers configure, say, a characters movement much easier.
MDA, honestly I don't know much about it, but from the description in the image it sounds like it still requires someone to "write a universal model"
I think the idea is that someone at the company could just take an already existing model and deploy it, not sure though.

Narrator: Programmers were never not needed.

Tell that to people 150 years ago.