This is my sense as well; I've been coding since the 90s and on HN since 2010.
I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.
I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.
It's not much different from assigning a task to a more junior dev. I'm the architect, it's my goals we're working towards, but I don't need to be the one to go wire it together.
I never said anything about pride. I was talking about whether terms like "build" apply when the act of building is outsourced to an AI agent.
Also, I would seriously scrutinize the claim that a person vibe coding an application is really getting into the nitty gritty details. These days it seems like people are merely describing what they want and a few high level guidelines, and then letting the AI agents to do the rest of the planning + architecture.
Good news: It doesn't.
I just don't have to do the typing, pre-acceptance testing, fuzzing, etc.
People are famously terrible at analyzing their own behavior. I would bet that people who "no longer write code" are actually way more hands off about their work than they believe they are.
Good for you!
The joy comes from the problem no longer existing, being solved, not from the physical act of typing.
Anyway, let's burn the data centers and become Luddites. Wait, first become Luddites, the we can burn things.
I am not a "programmer", I do "programming".
Good for you!
But for most people, their identity is often strongly influenced by how their community sees them
If you get paid to be a programmer, then society treats you as such, which often causes you to perceive yourself in kind.
To which the obvious answer is often: then why didn't you think of it? And if you thought of it, why didn't you iterate on it and polish it to achieve a proper product that actually matched your vision?
For some people, they seem to believe that an idea isn't worth anything, and only the building is. And, even then, they don't really understand that building a proper product (even with vibecoding) takes a lot of effort to get right, because as you build you find more about the domain, about how the product should work, etc. Sure, loads of people vibecode crap, but many don't. They build things with real care over the course of many many many hours.
It's not that I love agile, but this is one of the reasons it exists. I wonder if the people who so openly bash solving a problem through vibecoding (with multiple iterations) also fail to see this value of agile?
To answer your question (acknowledging I don't really know): If all you had to do was get Claude/Codex to work and it came out perfectly very fast, then I believe you did commission it (and I have no problem with that), but, more often that that, you will have built it by iterating on product decisions.
When I "build" products for clients, I am not doing commission development work. In fact, I'm not building it for them -- we are building it together, learning requirements, failing, iterating. Otherwise, I would have just been a code monkey, and that I have sincerely despised for years.
Lastly: at least for now, the impact of knowing how to guide the AI is still very relevant. Good problem solvers who embrace AI completely blow "regular guys" out of the water. Maybe, as models get better, this will not be as prevalent, but you can clearly tell when someone "knows" what they're doing with the AI, even if they NEVER look at the code. The knowledge from the coding days is definitely partly transferable.
But most software engineers I’ve worked with are not like that. In fact, they want to be as far away from the customer/user as possible and they love the coding for coding’s sake. I’m afraid those are the first to be replaced by AI as their skills don’t extend beyond writing code, which is probably why they are screaming so much now.
But it's not impressive that you did it - that's the point. Because anyone can do it. Its impressive what the LLM though.
Maybe the models with level this difference but right now it’s quite obvious the more you look around at products being built around you and by also just looking at what people around you can build with these tools.
This is sort of a rehash of the debate between product people and actual builders. I have always seen immense value in both sides.
Look, you like AI, that's fine. But stop lying to yourself for fuck sakes.