People (especially people who don't have a lot of hands on tech experience, or students who also aren't into building things) get the sense that writing software requires learning a lot of arcane tools. And the idea is to promise that anyone who can write a specification should be able to make software (yes, handwaving away the learning to specify well, which is a real skill with many dependent skills). This was the promise of no-code, and then they realized that the no-code system (in addition to usually being limited in power) is actually complex and requires specialized learning, and more of that the more powerful the system is. The LLM will replace SWEs approach is another take on that, because you don't need to learn a system, you prompt in natural language, and the model knows how to interface with the underlying system so you don't have to. In that sense, vibe coding is already the culmination of this goal (despite weaknesses such as maintainability issues).

I've seen it written that the main reason managers tend to want to get rid of SWEs is because they don't understand how to interface with them. Using an LLM solves that problem, because you don't need a nerd to operate it.