This is how basically everyone I know actually uses LLMs.
The whole story about vibecoding and LLMs replacing engineers has become a huge distraction from the really useful discussions to be had. It’s almost impossible to discuss LLMs on HN because everyone is busy attacking the vibecoding strawman all the time.
You're maintaining a large, professional codebase? You definitely shouldn't be vibe coding. The fact that some people are is a genuine problem. You want a simple app that you and your friends will use for a few weeks and throw away? Sure, you can probably vibe code something in 2 hours instead of paying for a SaaS. Both have their place.
I think the next step is to realize that this kind of product manager role is one that more "engineers" should be willing to take on themselves. It's pretty clear why user interviews and research and product requirement docs are not obviously within the wheelhouse of technical people, but building lots of prototypes and getting feedback is a much better fit!
Because the first thing that comes from individual speed up is not engineers making more money but there being less engineers, How much less is the question? Would they be satisfied with 10%, 50% or may be 99%?
If we doubled agricultural productivity globally we'd need to have fewer farmers because there's no way we can all eat twice as much food. But we can absolutely consume twice as much CSS, try to play call of duty on our smart fridge or use a new SaaS to pay our taxes.
Actually, most software either is garbage or goes to waste at some point too. Maybe that's too negative. Maybe one could call it rot or becoming obsolete or obscure.
It’s copium to think that with the combination of AI and oversupply of “good enough” developers, that it won’t be harder for developers to get jobs. We are seeing it now.
It wasn’t this bad after the dot com bust. Then if you were just an ordinary enterprise developer working “in the enterprise” in a 2nd tier city (raises hand), jobs were plentiful.
I saw this coming on the enterprise dev side where most people work back in 2015. Not AI of course, but the commoditization of development.
I started moving closer to the “business”, got experience in leading projects, soft skills, requirements gathering, AWS architecture etc.
I’m not saying the answer is to “learn cloud”. I am saying that it’s important to learn people skills and be the person trusted with strategy and don’t just be a code monkey pulling well defined tickets off the board.
I see this fallacy all the time but I don't know if there is a name for it.
I mean, we make used fun of MBAs for saying the same thing, but now we should be more receptive to the "Line Always Goes Up" argument?
I was referring specifically to this point, which, IMHO, is a fallacy:
>>> There seems to be effectively infinite demand for software from consumers and enterprises so the cheaper it gets the more they buy.
There is no way to use the word "infinite" in this context, even if qualified, that is representative of reality.
The demand for paid software is decreasing cause these AI companies are saying "Oh dont buy that SAAS product because you can build it yourself now"
Our attention is also a finite resource (24h a day max). We already see how this has been the cause for the enshittificaton of large swathes of software like social media where grabbing the attention for a few seconds more drives the main innovation...
Depending on how the future shapes up, we may have gone from artisans to middlemen, at which point we're only in the business of added value and a lot of coding is over.
Not the Google kind of coding, but the "I need a website for my restaur1ant" kind, or the "I need to agregate data from these excel files in a certain way" kind. Anything where you'd accept cheap and disposable. Perhaps even the traditional startup, if POCs are vibecoded and engineers are only introducer later.
Those are huge businesses, even if they are not present in the HN bubble.
I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015. There are no code website makers available since then and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point, its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that. If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website. This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects. Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store.
Note that I own an agency that does a lot of what you say is “solved”, and I assure you that it’s not (at least in terms of being an efficient market).
SMBs with ARR up to $100m (or even many times more that in ag) struggle to find anyone good to do technical work for them either internally or externally on a consistent basis.
> I am afraid that kind of jobs were already over by 2015.
Conceptually, maybe. In practice, definitely not.
> There are no code website makers available since then
… that mostly make shit websites.
> and if you can't do it yourself you can just pay someone on fiverr and get it done for less than $5-50 at this point,
Also almost certainly a shit website at that price point, probably using the no-code tools mentioned above.
These websites have so many things wrong with them that demonstrably decrease engagement or lose revenue.
> its so efficient even AI wont be more cost effective than that.
AI will be better very soon, as the best derivative AI tools will be trained on well-developed websites.
That said, AI will never have taste, and it will never have empathy for the end user. These things can only be emulated (at least for the time being).
> If you have $10k saved you can hire a competitive agency to maintain and build your website
You can get an ok “brochure” website built for that. Maintaining it, if you have an agency that actually stays in business, will be about $100 minimum for the lowest effort touch, $200 for an actually one line change (like business hours), and up from there from anything substantial.
If you work with a decent, reputable agency, a $10k customer is the lowest on the totem pole amongst the agency’s customer list. The work is usually delegated to the least experienced devs, and these clients are usually merely tolerated rather than embraced.
It sucks to be the smallest customer of an agency, but it’s a common phenomenon amongst certain classes of SMBs.
> This business is completely taken over by low cost fiverr automators and agencies for high budget projects.
This is actually true. Mainly because any decent small agency either turns into one that does larger contracts, or it gets absorbed by one.
That said, there is a growing market for mid-sized agencies (“lifestyle agencies”?).
> Agencies have become so good now that they manage websites from Adidas to Lando Norris to your average mom & pop store
As mentioned above, you absolutely do not want to be a mom and pop store working with a web agency that works with any large, international brand like Adidas.
I appreciate your points from a conceptual level, but the human element of tech, software, and websites will continue to be a huge business for many decades, imho.
If the prototype can be just dropped in and clear a PR and comply with all the standards, you're just doing software engineering for less money!
What’s “the vibecoding strawman”? There are plenty of people on HN (and elsewhere) repeatedly saying they use LLMs by asking them to “produce full apps in hours instead of weeks” and confirming they don’t read the code.
Just because everyone you personally know does it one way, it doesn’t mean everyone else does it like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faulty_generalization
Though I get that these days people tend to use “strawman” for anything they see as a bad argument, so you could be right in your assessment. Would be nice to have clarification on what they mean.
Good point.
> I think an accusation of straw-manning is in part a accusation of another's intent (or bad faith - not engaging with the argument).
There I partially disagree. Straw-manning is not engaging with the argument but it can be done accidentally. As in, one may genuinely misunderstand the nuance in an argument and respond to a straw man by mistake. Bad faith does require bad intent.
"Writing code is no longer needed for the most part."
It was a great post and I don't disagree with him. But it's an example of why it isn't necessarily a strawman anymore, because it is being claimed/realized by more than just vibecoders and hobbyists.
> Also note that the python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding. I know more about analog filters -- and that's not saying much -- than I do about python. It started out as my typical "google and do the monkey-see-monkey-do" kind of programming, but then I cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualizer.
* the README was clearly not written by an LLM nor aided
* he still uses GPLv2 (not 3) as the license for his works
You might think that everyone has FOMO or is an anti-AI Luddite when of course there are a LOT of us somewhere in the middle, just trying to get our work done and trying to figure out what our careers will look like in 5-10 years.
One big thing that no one seems to talk about - GenAI is unlocking many new (and oftentimes "small") business ideas that were not practical just a few years ago. I have witnessed this firsthand. . . however, it will also take away jobs. How many, who knows?
tl;dr everyone is full of shit or selling something or terrified to the point where they can't think straight. And no one has a crystal ball.
In part, I think what people are responding to is the trajectory of the tools. I would agree that they seem to be on an asymptote toward being able to do a lot more things on their own, with a lot less direction. But I also feel like the improvements in that direction are incremental at this point, and it's hard to predict when or if there will be a step change.
But yeah, I'm really not sure I buy this whole thing about orchestrating a symphony of agents or whatever. That isn't what my usage of AI is like, and I'm struggling to see how it would become like that.
But what I am starting to see, is "non-programmers" beginning to realize that they can use these tools to do things for their own work and interests, which they would have previously hired a programmer to do for them, or more likely, just decided it wasn't worth the effort. I think for those people, it does feel like a novel automation tool. It's just that we all already knew how to do this, by writing code. But most people didn't know how to do that. And now they can do a lot more.
And I think this is a genuine step change that will have a big effect on our industry. Personally, I think this is ultimately a very good thing! This is how computers should work, that anybody can use them to automate stuff they want to do. It is not a given that "automating tasks" is something that must be its own distinct (and high paying) career. But like any disruption, it is very reasonable to feel concerned and uncertain about the future when you're right in the thick of it.
Dunno why the author thinks an AI-enhanced junior can match the "output"of a whole team unless he means in generating lines of code, which is to say tech debt.
Being able to put a lot of words on screen is not the accomplishment in programming. It usually means you've gone completely out of your depth.
Because the author has a vested interest in peddling this bullshit given he works on Gemini at Google.
Many times, bad code is sufficient. Actually too many times: IMHO that is the reason why the software industry produces lower quality software every year. Bad products are often more profitable than good products. But it's not always for making bad products: sometimes it's totally fine to vibe code a proof or concept or prototype, I would say.
Other times, we really need stable and maintainable code. I don't think we can or want to vibe code that.
LLMs make low-quality coding more accessible, but I don't think they remove the need for high-quality coding. Before LLMs, the fraction of low-quality code was growing already, just because it was already profitable.
An analogy could be buildings: everybody can build a bench that "does the job". Maybe that bench will be broken in 2 months, but right now it works; people can sit on it. But not everybody can build a dam. And if you risk going to jail if your dam collapses, that's a good incentive for not vibe coding it.
I've built a few things end to end where I can verify the tool or app does what I want and I haven't seen a single line of the code the LLM wrote. It was a creepy feeling the first time it happened but it's not a workflow I can really use in a lot of my day to day work.
Not really sure why this article is talking about what happens 2 years from now since that’s 8 times longer than anything anyone with money or power cares about.
The street cred doesn't come from managing more resources, the street cred comes from delivering more.
Then I have some non-trivial side projects where I don’t really care about the code quality, and I’m just letting it run. If I dare look at the code, there’s a bunch of repetition. It rarely gets stuff right the first time, but that’s fine, because it’ll correct it when I tell it it doesn’t work right. Probably full of security holes, code is nasty, but it doesn’t matter for the use-cases I want. I have produced pieces of software here that are actively making my life better, and it’s been mostly unsupervised.
The next step was for me to write a cron job that would reapply the chattr +1 and rewrite the file once in 5 minutes. Sort of an enforcer. I used Claude (web) to write this and cut/pasted it just because I didn't want to bother with bash syntax that I learned and forgot several times.
I then wanted something stronger and looked at publicly available things like pluckeye but they didn't really work the way I wanted. So I tried to write a quick version using Claude (web) and started running it (October 2025). It solved my problem for me.
I wanted a program to use aider on and I started with this. Every time, I needed a feature (e.g. temporary unblocks, prevent tampering and uninstalling, blocking in the browser, violation tracking etc.), I wrote out what I wanted and had the agent do it. OVer the months, it grew to around 4k lines (single file).
Around December, I moved to Claude code from aider and continued doing this. The big task I gave it was to refactor the code into smaller files so that I could manage context better. IT did this well and added tests too. (late December 2025).
I added a helper script to update URLs to block from various sources. Vibe-coded too. Worked fine.
Then, I found it hogging memory because of some crude mistakes I vibe-coded early on fixed that. Cost me around $2 to do so. (Jan 2026).
Then I added support to lock the screen when I crossed a violation threshold. This required some Xlib code to be written. I'm sure I could have written it but it's not really worth it. I know what to do and doing it by hand wouldn't really teach me anything except the innards of a few libraries. I added that.
So, in short, this is something that's 98% AI coded but it genuinely solves a problem for me and has helped me change my behaviour in front of a computer. There are no companies that my research revealed that offer this as a service for Linux. I know what to do but don't have the time write and debug it. With AI, my problem was solved and I have something which is quite valuable to me.
So, while I agree with you that it isn't an "automation tool", the speed and depth which it brings to the environment has opened up possibilities that didn't previously exist. That's the real value and the window through which I'm exploring the whole thing.
It trims the time requirement of a bit of functionality that you might have searched for 4 examples down by the time requirement of 3 of those searches.
It does however remove the benefit of having done the search which might be that you see the various results, and find that a secondary result is better. You no longer get that benefit. Tradeoffs.
What has worked for me is treating it like an enthusiastic intern with his foot always on the accelerator pedal. I need to steer and manage the brakes otherwise, it'll code itself off a cliff and take my software with it. The most workable thing is a pair programmer. For trivial changes and repeatedly "trying stuff out", you don't need to babysit. For larger pieces, it's good to make each change small and review what it's trying.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...
It seems it only took until about 2023 or so