From a business perspective, they don't care about this. They just want it built as inexpensively as possible in a reasonable time frame.
Vibe coding is here to stay.
Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was the lowest hanging fruit for LLMs.
Once we can do LLM code reviews with high confidence and little error, coding is essentially a dead field.
The closer you are to atoms and further the way you are from bits, the better off you will be in the coming two decades as AI progresses
I'm over here trying to play with bleeding edge tech and push some boundaries. I keep trying to get LLMs to help me and they keep letting me down.
I'm sure this is less thann useless for stuff like embedded or other low level coding.
and in 20 years, how are we developing this "subject matter expert"?
>Once we can do LLM code reviews with high confidence and little error, coding is essentially a dead field.
Maybe by the time I retire. I think people in their early 20's will still get a solid career out of coding in the meantime while we go through the inevitable hype cycle of shiny new tech. Even if in the middle of their careers they may truly have their hands forced.
I agree, and it's why I'm not worried about running out of paying work as I head into the latter half of my career.
A long, unplanned outage is much more destructive to a brand than a delayed release. Vibe coding prioritizes the latter at the expense of the former.
I never vibe coded, and I don't understand this trend AT ALL.
I read how copilot and such are detrimental to critical thinking, and I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now.
Perhaps I have the concept wrong, because half the time I'm still editing code by hand.
You still get code hell after a while unless you review the code and refactor where needed, but I can absolutely imagine a future where the code is just a compile target for the architecture and design I specify. A little bit like a compiler spitting out assembly (caveats apply, LLMs being non-deterministic etc etc and at current state probably not reliable enough for full unsupervised coding)
Very soon we will run out of human written articles.
One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over. Every company has to reinvent so many wheels for themselves because sharing code between for profit companies just isn't done outside of the occasional breaking a whole project off into an open source project. This is what LLMs are good at, the very repetitive boilerplate connecting the dots and doing obvious things. Companies are going to have to retool themselves to only really be doing "the hard part", and the rest left to LLMs. In the same way languages will have to change to accommodate the hard part and the easy part.
It's not the same human who is doing the same thing over and over though.
I have a toddler. He's learning addition and substraction now. I could had him a calculator or LLM and let him skip the entire learning process and do something productive instead. I don't. Because it'll destroy his critical thinking and ability to do anything productive later in life.
more "everybody who wants toast is designing their own toaster"
the actual business logic is making up a tiny proportion of work done while everybody spends most of their time plumbing frameworks and libraries together to do substantially similar things
If it's really "boilerplate", nobody should need to get a half-regurgitated approximation out of a statistical model.
Instead there should be a default implementation someone can choose until they need to customize, or a generator-script as part of the project, etc. Sometimes what people want is already right there in the docs, but nobody bothered to look.
I would say this is true in the same way that copy-paste coding functioned and that vibe coding isn't fundamentally different. It can be a useful approach to a variety of problems.
Having capable, knowledgable, and skilled employees is important to businesses though. If your business is something easily approachable then you are at risk of being outcompeted from companies with more skilled employees. There are truly hellscapes of codebases out there without the glimmer of hope of being worked on with vibe coding alone. On top of that, I'm getting the feeling that vibe coding is a sure way to hellscape your own codebase. Nothing can take the place of critical thinking.
Haven't really tried vibe coding myself yet, but I'm tempted to give it a go. I imagine stuff like integrating external API's could be really handy, looking through external documentation and creating the correct calls to the correct endpoints is always a huge timesink. Seems like AI should be able to make short work of such tasks
Yes. But in these early stages, that will only prove the LLM's can't do much more than be a fancy autocomplete, as opposed to a way to accelerate the workflow navigating anything with real-world value.
Maybe in a few years for the most common domains this will truly shine.
Makes sense. Many businesses lately are churning out awful software that barely functions. Maybe if they were willing to support proper engineering that would be less of an issue.
Which yeah, of course, that their job. It’s the authors job to write a good book. The publisher needing to sell books doesn’t contradict or supercede the authors need to write well or develop their process.
To quote Copilot, "According to recent data, nearly 70% of top economic performers use their own software to differentiate themselves from competitors."