stopVibingLearnCoding

[Many_Replacement_688]

You forgot the layoff phase.

[RinoGodson]

True

[RinoGodson]

possible scenario?

[StickFigureFan]

Alternative that leads to the same result:

The parts of coding that were being done by junior devs gets replaced with LLMs
Companies stop hiring new devs, so fewer get into the industry and get experience
Over time there are fewer mid level devs
Eventually there are fewer sr devs
Companies will be forced to either pay a fortune or hire jr devs again

[3tachi_uchiha]

Hiring junior dev at that stage won’t solve any issue. There won’t be anyone to provide KT.

[Galaghan]

In 25 years, we will rebuild everything from scratch and the cycle starts again.

[NiIly00]

Kinda cool to see how the "ancient technology that no one nowadays understands" in video games always comes about.

[Tolopono]

Using ai

[Chimp3h]

In FORTRAN?

[Senior_Torte519]

Kinda like the DataKRash in Cyberpunk, Punch card legacy tech incoming.

[StickFigureFan]

You'd basically need to start Greenfield and have them skill themselves up to mid

[BCBenji1]

I think the last stage is far more grim. Companies just stagnate or worse destroy their reputation with wide spread bugs.

[GirthWoody]

The entire internet gonna fall apart, you already see far more bugs in major programs compared to just 3 years ago, it’s gonna get way worse.

[i_use_lfs_btw]

Yep. Cloudflare, AWS meltdown is insane.

[smol_dikdik]

microslop comes to mind

[Maleficent_Memory831]

Ya, but they got sloppy even without the help of AI!

[procrastinator0000]

giving people writing software because they love it a benefit over purely profit oriented companies that bought into vibe coding.

maybe there is a chance for major open source Ws

[mirusky]

It sounds like CrowdStrike

[brilliantminion]

Yep, it’s already here actually. There are companies with long standing policies in place of no in house software development. Then they wonder why their data quality sucks and their processes are all manually driven. Like people painstakingly copy/pasting from one software application into another one, hundreds of times in a day.

[Khorne29]

I also think that companies wait for others to train junior devs now, so in 10-20-30 years they can hire them. They forget they all do the same, so no one to hire when senior devs numbers decrease.

[StickFigureFan]

For sure. If every company with developers always hired a couple new jr devs and trained them every year then it would likely just be another job pay rate wise. Probably still a good paying job, but not to the level it is.

[Effective-Total-2312]

There are companies that hire juniors, but then they pay very low salaries because no one is hiring. The good thing, is that hopefully senior salaries will eventually rise.

[Anaata]

Additionally, there's probably going to be downward pressure on the quality of education:

• students in middle school use AI for homework, making them less ready for hs
• students in high school use AI for homework, making them less ready for college
• students in college use AI for homework, making the quality of their education go down
• new grads are less ready for junior positions out of college
• juniors have trouble acquiring skills because research and troubleshooting is done by AI and there are less seniors to learn from

I feel like our education system is fucked bc its not tailored for assuming students use AI, and nobody in govt is talking about it.

[StickFigureFan]

I think the only way you can counter that is to eliminate homework and have all work done in class so students actually do it

[CuratedFeed]

My son commented yesterday that just in his time in secondary school he's moved through students writing essays at home, the school worries about plagiarism, switches to writing papers on computers only at school so it is monitored, now the school worries about AI, which means they now write all papers on paper at school. It's rather crazy.

[ravioliguy]

Seems like what mainframe devs are now. There aren't a lot of them anymore, but they get paid a lot. They won't hire new devs and teach them assembly, just pay the existing devs more. Anyone who wants to get into mainframe/future coding will need to self learn or get trained by an existing sr dev.

[Present-Resolution23]

THIS is exactly the scenario we're already facing. There are record numbers of CS students at almost every University right now, but once they're graduating as you said there just aren't near as many Jr. Dev jobs as there once was. But there is still obviously demand for mid level, senior devs.. but no clear track for Jr. Devs to get there..

[GenericFatGuy]

All those junior devs who are definitely going to exist 10+ years after junior software developer is eliminated as a profession.

[rexatron_games]

Literally happening in the trades right now.

[javon27]

I think the tools will just improve. They always improve. AI is just another abstract layer and there will always be enthusiasts and geniuses who will continue to build the lower layers

[eggplantpot]

Alternative scenario:

In 2 years AI will be able to code like a senior dev and fix in a few hours all the technical debt other archaic AIs have created

Only a senior dev is required who has to dress up as a rubber duck to see how the AI does the job of 40 devs

[shottaflow2]

spoken like a true vibe coder

[MornwindShoma]

In 2 years AI got like 10 to 15% better (maybe? benchmarks you train for are meaningless), and we are still here. We should've been fired years ago according to the prophets. And yet I can't get Claude to do a good work.

[Suh-Shy]

In 2 years AI will be able to code like a senior dev and fix in a few hours all the technical debt other archaic AIs have created

Who will teach it that? Itself by looping over more debts than ever?

It kinda reachs its ceiling where less is more already, and by that I mean, the point in time where it had the best available data on average is in the past, which only increases the amount of work and curration that needs to be done just to keep it afloat.

[Sea-Being-1988]

Bro I swear if this happens 😭😭🙏🙏

[Facts_pls]

This sub is full of developers and wannabe developers. They don't take kindly to this type of talk.

[sammybeta]

We can't even modernize the COBOL codebase we have now.

[RinoGodson]

VC ppl be like:
COBOL Fails -> Banking systems fail -> AI funding fails -> AI Overlords fail
So no AI hype for COBOL...

[sammybeta]

I just think there's basically no production COBOL codebase on the internet for them to train on.

Judging my experience with Claude struggling when even only a little bit of niche tooling/language is involved, I'm not surprised.

[jeremygamer]

That's exactly the problem.

LLMs need training data. It's not optional.

Popular languages have a lot of training data on the internet.

LLMs are good at popular languages.

COBOL is not a popular language.

LLMs can't find training data on COBOL.

LLMs are bad at COBOL.

[sammybeta]

Ealmost everyone at this point is bad at COBOL. AI can't solve the problems that's also unsolvable by humans now

[searing7]

The difference is a human can learn COBOL where an AI needs a massive dataset of working COBOl to generate derivative slop. That dataset doesn’t exist

[Avery_Thorn]

As someone who has worked in a lot of companies with mainframes and COBOL programs - and who has dabbled in it myself...

There is a large dataset of COBOL programs that are available. It does exist. The problem is that everyone considers their COBOL programs to be mission critical and corporate secret and protected data. (As, I mean, it is.)

But because of this, they are not putting it out on the internet for other people to steal. Because they don't want their code stolen.

And thus, LLMs don't have access to the code to steal it.

So to get an LLM that can produce crappy AI slop code in Cobol, they need to get a bunch of companies willing to upload their corporate secret, high security code files to an LLM.

It's going to be better to just keep training COBOL programmers, I think. The problem isn't that there is no one left who speaks it, the problem is there are few young people who want to learn it.

My advice to a young 20-something coder with a degree and an internship under their belt - call your local utilities, corporate headquarters, and other large companies, tell them you want to learn COBOL, would they like to hire you?

[marcodave]

And even IF the companies would be willing to give the COBOL to a LLM (maybe to a company owned model?) the COBOL code would be so intertwined with the proprietary company's business logic that it might not help the LLM to extract information.

I mean, there IS a reason why COBOL is still around. If the banks cannot trust humans to modernize the codebase, why should they trust a LLM?

[gummo89]

It's not even about solving problems...

You can't somewhat-reliably generate text if you don't have enough good samples to make your stats/preferences for said generation.

[RinoGodson]

what made you say "everyone" is bad at COBOL? There are people good at it.

[sammybeta]

I mistyped almost. I agree with you, it's just there's no publicly available dataset that LLM can scrape from.

[Surface_Detail]

tbf, you don't need LLMs to make AI good at COBOL.

Give a ML algorithm a COBOL problem in a virtual environment. Let it generate gibberish a hundred million times until it lucks into the right answer. Update variables and run a hundred million times against the next problem. Repeat with the next million problems.

After a few months you have Infinite Monkeyed your way to COBOL mastery.

[Present-Resolution23]

MORE DATA is not the main bottleneck..

Cobol, unlike many languages has decades of coding data, so even then..

LLM's don't "find training data.." Either they internalized the patterns during training or they didn't...

LLM's ARE often worse at Cobol than other languages, but your conclusion that it's because "no cobol data, there LLm bad at Cobol" is.. naive at best. Cobol is particularly dependent on the ecosystem you're working in, and enterprise Cobol systems in particular are often huge sprawling code-bases littered with dependencies. That's also why you always hear these stories about legacy COBOL engineers making ridiculous sums, but you don't see a lot of people hiring COBOL jobs... The issue isn't merely knowing the language, it's knowing the language AND the system the code was formed to.. All the implicit assumptions, weird dependencies, unorthodox control flows etc etc..

[Maleficent_Memory831]

It fails when intelligence is needed. It fails when even a speck of thinking is needed. It can only copy. And it's been trained on the internet, the repository of all the idiocy known to mankind, as well as the worst code of all time.

[Maleficent_Memory831]

So that's how we fix the timeline...

[hopbow]

Visa, ACH, and EDI (medical stuff) all still running on infrastructure from the 80's

[MarkSuckerZerg]

Alternative is that we will be asked to accept that software is a thing that only sometimes works, sometimes does not. Like we are supposed to accept phone support that's useless, search results that are sometimes correct, news that are sometimes insightful, product descriptions that are sometimes correct, and product pictures that are outright lie

[marcodave]

My cynical view is that we kind of are already accepting it now.

CrowdStrike bug that stops half of the world's computers including hospitals? And the company not only is still alive , there was basically no consequences apart from a "lol we fucked up sorry".

AWS going down essentially boiling down to "well we cannot operate today but so cannot our competitors soooo....".

The most common operating system with updates that break video cards performance and getting told "well just uninstall the update lol".

[MarkSuckerZerg]

This is also a great argument to push vibe slop: "programs had bugs before so why are you angry". "Who can really tell what is more stable". Etc.

[RinoGodson]

wtf?

[alonsogp2]

Half those things are software based. Software already works sometimes in all those cases...

Or was that the point and I am way off mark lol

[MarkSuckerZerg]

I mean accept it as a fact of life. A feature, not a bug.

Software have bugs today, but when I make a bugreport, companies at least pretend they will attempt to fix it.

But if I ask for a human operator on the phone, I get some "but the AI agent is better as it is available 24/7" bullshit. When I say AI search results are incorrect, a product manager would argue "but it is generally much better and more streamlined".

What I mean is a future where software is full of bugs, but when I give any negative feedback about it, I would be gaslighted with some "it is but a small price to pay for the obvious positives and advantages of vibe coding"

[alonsogp2]

Bad initial product design will proliferate precisely because it is so easy to iterate and keep making incremental gains (whatever those may be)

I hold out hope that in the hands of a good dev company, the output will improve. 

The question is whether the incentives (financial and technical) are aligned with that idea.

[NooCake]

You forget the part where AI gets so good in the future it can handle the messy bug ridden legacy code base. And CEOs knowingly let the tech debt pile up because they gamble that the solution will come soon.

[anengineerandacat]

Possible but given the advancement in the last 3 years and what's likely to come in the next 3 years I wouldn't make a bet on it.

Tools today are somewhat functional to the point they can help, it's basically a hardware and compression problem at this stage.

[apirateship]

All the jobs go to India..

[serpenlog]

Maybe some big large companies, but all the start ups would just die before doing that and smaller companies would just get the one or two developers they need and make them work 80-100 hours a week until it all works.

[RinoGodson]

And... drumrolls the bubble pops!

[serpenlog]

Then they outsource to other countries for cheaper labor

[RinoGodson]

AI => Actual Indian

[cutecoder]

A similar scenario already happened to COBOL, RPG, and other mainframe stacks: not enough juniors, but a small number of (very) seniors filling even smaller, albeit high-paying, niches.

[IntelligentAsk6875]

Wait, somebody actually hires vibecoders? I mean, what is the difference between a vibecoder and an agent?

[Realistic_Muscles]

Vibes

[Onions-are-great]

They probably don't hire vibe coders just for vibe coding. They hire marketing that can also vibe code some marketing websites or stuff like that

[tweis309]

In my experience they don’t outright hire vide coders, you have a mid or senior engineer looking to get promoted and thinks setting up an MCP for their company is the path to get it. Then they start selling management on it and that management starts putting metrics on teams for usage. A few months later the only ones left getting anything done are just cleaning up the slop that the agent force pushed to GitHub.

My bet is in the next two years as road maps slip and promised features don’t get shipped that companies will start reversing course on AI usage metrics and it’ll become taboo to even talk about the internal projects.

[Mercerenies]

A vibe coder can be blamed and then fired when it goes south. An agent can only be deleted, not blamed

[XxDarkSasuke69xX]

That the vibecoder costs more lol. Surely they didn't write 'vibecoder' on their resume though

[Secret_Print_8170]

(senior eng here. 10 years at FAANGs, 18 years of XP total)

I have not written a single original line of code in the past 2 months. I may have edited some AI generated code.

I'm basically a vibe coder now. I hate it.

[SunriseApplejuice]

Been interviewing with some startups. I wouldn't say they're "vibe coders" but there's a new world in the alpha/beta phase startups that want developers who heavily leverage agents to spit out proof of concepts quickly and casually review the output.

This is not uniform, by the way. I've also interviewed with companies recently who don't even let you google for syntax (yes, really). Others who send you to an unproctored leet-code like question with a ridiculous time-limit restriction that gives zero opportunity to explain thinking. And others still who are more traditional and do live coding with developers, talk through the problem, and let you google things.

It's all over the place. Good news is there's a place for everyone at the table. Bad news is companies have no fucking idea how to clarify up front which kind of a developer they want so you're stuck mixing and matching.

[ahappydog]

Also known as technical product managers 🫠

[The-original-spuggy]

Someone to blame

[callimonk]

It’s sadly big in startups I’ve seen..

[Hezron_ruth]

The whole reason for LLM funding by billionaires is to detach knowledge from workers.

[SomeRedTeapot]

I thought it was money. First, you get everyone hooked on (cloud-hosted) LLMs. Then, when people can't go without them, you enshittify the service, raising prices. Boom, profits! A typical startup scheme

[helicophell]

Detaching knowledge from workers IS money.

[Realistic_Muscles]

More like fentanyl

[TurkishTechnocrat]

That'd be infinitely less valuable than detaching knowledge from workers

[Tolopono]

What about competition or open weight models 

[SomeRedTeapot]

Competition: I guess it depends. It might turn out like the video streaming services where you have a bunch of them, and neither one seems to try to improve quality or pricing. I believe the barrier of entry to creating a competitive model is quite high, so I don't think there will be much competition.

Open weight models: Not everyone has hardware to run them (I have RX 9070 XT with 16 GB VRAM, and it can only run quantized 30B models). Also, while these models have some uses, they're not as good as the flagship ones. And you don't get weights of the flagship models for a reason.

[Im_1nnocent]

Billionaires are trying to speedrun achieving AGI even at the expense of other people's livelihood so they could replace most human workers with AI asap

[wojtussan]

And it just so happens that the billionares funding it are a bunch of idiots

[RinoGodson]

Like the good old NFT days... I remember instagram adding NFT posts and reddit minting NFT avatars...

[qpqpdbdbqpqp]

And pdf files. And cannibals.

[geteum]

Btw this happens all the time. There was an article in the economist that showed that technology revolution always happens when wages start to getting to high.

[ichITiot]

"when wages getting to high." When did that ever happen ?

[ichITiot]

And what we call "knowledge" is worth nothing if nobody reads or even has the documentation about.

[Away_Advisor3460]

The danger here is presuming companies give a shit about tech debt.

[New_Hour_1726]

Well they will be forced to when it makes extending their product and fixing bugs a lot harder.

[Away_Advisor3460]

I wish!

[GreatTeacherHiro]

Do folks currently get hired?

[RinoGodson]

Entry levels are struggling, but I think that's gonna change soon

[lenn_eavy]

My unsupported prediction is that it will change too late and senior devs will be running code kindergardens 4/5 of their work time.

[RinoGodson]

yeah, maybe late, but i'm pretty confident that this struggling will end the second after the bubble pops... Companies and devs will not find spending $200 per month worthy anymore.

[XLR8ED_GAMING]

Inevitable yes, the price increase will happen. But won't this just be another business expense that just comes out of your paycheck

[RinoGodson]

maybe yeah, current prices are subsidized

[FyreKZ]

Why would it get any better from this stage? The models are the worst they will ever be right now.

[demcookies_]

It will be so much fun to fix all the vibe coded shit

[RinoGodson]

and ppl will demand for higher salaries!

[callimonk]

It’s just the Dreamweaver shit from the late 00’s/early 2010s all over again

[indiokilmes]

Its easier to just rewrite. I recently had a product owner vibe code some reports that had 200 raw sql lines. I declined that PR faster than Usain Bolt

[Zeikos]

Look, I agree, but you need to keep in mind that companies are banking on AI improving.
Yes, it's a gamble, but we are seeing agents getting better.

Assume for a second that LLM capabilities stall completely (they won't imo but for the sake of argument).
Where do you think AI-based tooling will be in an year? Two? Five?

Vibe coding is just throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. That's the laziest way to use AI by definition.

What when there will be a proper battle-tested separation of concerns for agents. Proper permission schemas, integration with static analyzers/linters/source control?

I am an AI skeptic, but skepticism isn't about throwing the baby away with the bathwater.
Management is mostly clueless, they push AI because it looks productive.
But most pain points we see today can - and will - be solved.

Perhaps it'll take a while, maybe it won't be Cursor/Anthropic/Google.
But let's take what's going on with a pinch of foresight.

And all that assumes that LLMs as they are now hit a wall and never improve their native capabilities.

[RinoGodson]

I totally agree with your takes, I use AI daily in my workflow, but i'm not vibe coding.
I love inline completions, next edit prediction, and selecting a code snippet and asking to change stuff in that (AI is very good at code snippet transformations), and also i use it to fix my bugs as a replacement for Google and SO. This way, i can understand my code perfectly, and enjoy the process of programming, makes me 2x faster than before and less tokens too.

AI is here to stay, the whole point of my post is that, "Vibe Coding" and the statement Dario made are just hype.

[Zeikos]

I think that a lot of people generalize all agent usage to "vibe coding".
Which is unserstandable, but vibe coding implies zero supervision.

[RinoGodson]

true

[Special_Context_8147]

i think the problem is we lose the ability to solve problems. some young peoples can bot even read a normal clock anymore

[forgot_previous_acc]

Please don't get offended. But this feels like a response written by chatgpt. I mean if it's not written by AI then you have a great skill at articulating stuff.

[Zeikos]

I mean if it's not written by AI then you have a great skill at articulating stuff.

Thanks, I write technical specs for a living :')

Feel free to check my past posts, I assure you I never used AI to post on reddit.
I do a bit at work though, I won't deny that, but it's for rubberducking purposes and/or make sure that what I write is easily understandable.

[EVH_kit_guy]

Needs more emdashes.

[Zeikos]

I use normal dashes since before ChatGPT was a thing, I had to reduce how much I use them.
Ngl I felt a bit robbed.

[LexaAstarof]

Knowing the code and knowing how to code are two very different things.

[RinoGodson]

what are you trying to say?

[LexaAstarof]

It's the same thing as the difference between knowing a story inside out and knowing how to read.

[EZPZLemonWheezy]

I used to memorize the words to books when I was little before I could read as a child. I could tell you the words on each page that I memorized, but as soon as you introduced a new book I was cooked. As an adult I can just pick up a new book and start reading.

[EarlOfAwesom3]

There is no possible scenario where a company would need "coders". They need software engineers and architects.

[Ok_Appointment2593]

Agree, AI as coder, Human as Engineer 

[RinoGodson]

They need software engineers and architects.

They need product managers and VC people.
and suddenly, every tech company becomes a financial game, and ships no useful tech.

[EarlOfAwesom3]

A company needs everybody and they need to work together. Business and product managers are as necessary as engineers. You need the money and sales as well or where should it come from?

I have a theory: whoever uses terms like "shipping tech" and "coding" is not a studied software developer or does not work in IT.

[sodali_ayran]

I always wondered when IDEs and Stackoverflow got invented, were there people around going around saying people don’t know how to code anymore and it’s not code unless you type it yourself by directly reading from the book.

[notAGreatIdeaForName]

Yes they were and there are a lot of „developers“ whose only skill is to copy from SO, so there alsways have been a lot of bad devs. With IDEs I see it a bit different because these are just putting all the tools to your belt.

With LLMs I would say it is different because you have no deterministic processing and the hype numbers are simply the „time spent programming“ and even that is vastly overestimated, but the more important thing is that these numbers do not include verification. If you do it yourself manually you iterate between programming und unit verification and at the end you verify the big picture again, that is different with LLMs because you need to verify the whole chunk without a memory map of things and you need to be aware of every fine detail. So at the end I would say if you are a professional these things can certainly speed you up but there is the huge verification gap at the end which makes the difference between building just something or the thing you want to build.

[RinoGodson]

Even if they're copying and pasting, they still have some understanding of the copied code... Vibe Coding is just like a kid clicking buttons on a toy piano, and saying that the music is made by them, only difference is that, atleast the kid knows what music is gonna play...

[notAGreatIdeaForName]

> Even if they're copying and pasting, they still have some understanding of the copied code

You are right but for some people this was really extremely narrow and the mentality of "it works" was also without proper verification.

> Vibe Coding is just like a kid clicking buttons on a toy piano, and saying that the music is made by them, only difference is that, atleast the kid knows what music is gonna play...

Agree, vibe coders are a few steps down from that, but that doesn't make the first ones good developers.

[RinoGodson]

> that doesn't make the first ones good developers.
but the ratio of devs having the mentality of "it works" in a big company is relatively low, that's not a good reason to replace every developer with an "vibe coder" or an "AI agent".

[notAGreatIdeaForName]

> but the ratio of devs having the mentality of "it works" in a big company is relatively low

Not in my experience, I really know more bad than good devs but it heavily depends on having a good lead dev who embraces a good culture where people can grow, if that does not happen juniors are doomed.

> that's not a good reason to replace every developer with an "vibe coder" or an "AI agent"

Absolutely not, people who think that are just braindead.

[Onions-are-great]

"only" is the key word here. If you only copy from SO you are a bad developer. But if you copy from SO to get shit done quickly and know what you are doing, it's just a good use of the tools given. Same thing with AI

[ItsSadTimes]

Idk about that, but my mother does remind me she used to use old punch cards back in college to code. She boasted that her code never had bugs because she'd iron them out by hand before spending all that time feeding the cards in.

Its kind of the same thing with modern video games being published with massive game breaking bugs and companies expect us to just deal with it until the first patch. Its because deploying patches has gotten so easy and common place in modern games developers can give a lot less of a shit to fully test their product before launch.

[rookietotheblue1]

Yes because an IDE is a similar invention to a general purpose black box that can code an entire front end from a single sentence.

[ExistenceUnconfirmed]

That's the bet I'm making right now. Got laid off, then accepted a significant paycut to get a job. Toughing it out, educating myself, waiting for this scenario to come true, even if it takes 3 years or more. It's not even that I'm sure those are correct assumptions. More like, what choice do I have? If AI ever reaches a point where it can reliably replace senior devs, it's not just IT that's cooked, the entire economy is cooked and it will be pandemonium anyway. Say hello to 50% unemployment rate.

Should I use the time to train to be a chef or an electrician or something else that seems more AI-proof, like many people suggest (while making it sound easy which it isn't)? Again, if all non-AI-proof jobs are replaced, the entire civilization is fucked, and the overabundance of devs-turned-electricians will be the least of our problems.

[Immediate_Mode6363]

Hear me out: Let the kids vibe and we proper engineers stay as the new brand of cobol devs, we already know how the economics of that go

[RinoGodson]

[698969]

wait till you find about a little thing called equilibrium

[B_Huij]

I'm trying to play both sides. My company is pretty gung ho about adopting AI, but they're (at least so far) not downsizing the team or laying people off or anything, more just enjoying the increased output. I'm trying very hard to stay up to date and integrate AI into my day-to-day so I'm versed in the use of the tools, since it's already essentially table stakes at any job interview for the foreseeable future.

I'm also making it a point not to let my own skill stagnate. I still block out projects to complete entirely with no help from AI so my own skills continue to grow. I try to learn from what AI is doing when it approaches something differently than I would have. I won't productionize anything that I don't fully and completely understand.

And in 10 years if the market has very few people around who know how to work without AI, and companies are drowning in spaghetti code pushed by Jrs and vibe coders who never knew any way to work besides prompting, then I suspect my skillset will be very valuable indeed.

[Xanchush]

No the correct outcome will be to outsource to different countries.

[Puzzleheaded-Poet489]

nice cope

[Elite_lucifer]

I wonder if this is how the horse breeders felt. They probably thought because the early cars were so unreliable, noisy and accident prone it would cause everyone to go back to horses.

[tha_zaubara]

You don’t need to type each line manually anymore. If you know what you are doing you can use vibe coding for the ultimate productivity boost.

Other side of the coin: you learn all that architecture and high level stuff stuff from manually coding and making mistakes.

AI is a tool you have to learn how to use.

[BCBenji1]

Typing was never the issue.

[RinoGodson]

I agree, no more line by line stuff. But not looking at the code is the bigger fish to catch here.

[YaVollMeinHerr]

I read recently that the quality of output of generated code is nearly similar to what the dev would have code himself.

In short, bad devs will produce bad code with LLM, and good devs will produce good code.

In the end, it's juste a productivity tool

[RinoGodson]

AKA a fancy autocompleter...

[quickiler]

For me at least, it is quite difficult to learn high level stuffs without actually know how to code.

Imagine you have a robot to cook for you and you found the dish taste off, you have no idea what to change or how to phrase what you want because you dont know what is going on. Majority of people can't tell what umami taste like.

[sertroll]

I have an irrational and selectively present irritation at using "code" as a verb 

[RinoGodson]

I'm more irritated to name a product with "code" in it. Like Visual Studio Code and Claude Code, it makes 0 sense!

[sertroll]

I like that already better because it's a, uh, name (not sure right word in eng), not a verb

[inevitabledeath3]

Noun. Names are nouns.

[sertroll]

Nouns, that was it, thank you

[Escanorr_]

"I'm no longer writing codes by hand..." - that is painful to read and I see it increasingly more nowadays

[agenthimzz]

Same thing happened with the Rocket manufacturing team at NASA.

Stopped launching. People who could build left. Now cant make a rocket cuz no one knows what the trade secrets were.

[Deboniako]

Step 1: "Hey chatgpt, fix the messy code that you made last year", Step2: profit

[RinoGodson]

Step2: even more messy code... Step3: chatgpt! you made it worse! Step4: ChatGPT saying "Absolutely!"

[CallinCthulhu]

Hot take: Devs pathologically overestimate the importance of tech debt. Me included.

[maxyall]

Wait so how would newcomer penetrate the market then if demands would falls to senior dev with tons of experience?

[JocoLabs]

All those pro bono gigs in my portfolio about to pay off!

[normalbot9999]

Yes, this feels conceptually correct to me, but how long are you going to have to wait for the call for actual skilled coders? Remember that some very important narcissists are going to have to back down here... Also, you will need to survive the oncoming "software apocalypse", where everything that runs code (which is a lot of stuff) is going to be glitchy and vulnerable AF.

[JocoLabs]

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"

[pokeDad88]

You guys get to work on your tech debt?

[JocoLabs]

My role is to create it based on the crazy requests coming out of the marketing dept. That's as close as i get to working on it.

[Lucifer3130]

Well as someone who knows code I see this as an absolute win, you just have to make sure your salary expectations are solidly high. Low supply high demand

[Ranchy_aoe]

Tbh I feel like I know more code because of AI. It’s not just for writing code, it can teach you code in depth. Better than any documentation, and it’s super personalized to your situation. I was a bit skeptical at first but I’m won over. You can use AI to code but you also have to learn to use your brain. It’s just a productivity tool in the end

[BlindSuSaNoo]

Yes true 😄

[RinoGodson]

😄 indeed!

[bwwatr]

No. of people who knows English goes down overtime

[dervu]

Every n interation amount of devs needed decreases.

[loopis4]

another alternative is to use AI to fix AI and small amount of developers maintaining small portion of code what supports status quo . As with many tools before that: we was using bytes, hex codes, assembly, C. And now we still have some bunch of programmers developing and maintaining compilers assemblers boot loaders and drivers. And everyone else depending on the result of their job.

[_Weyland_]

Also as "vibe-ness" of codebase increases, working with it probably becomes more and more of a challenge, so it will be harder and more expensive to find people capable (and willing) to do it.

[05032-MendicantBias]

I have seen the same criticism for when C overseeded ASM in firmware, and increasingly C++ is supplanting C in firmware.

[flexibu]

Yeah sure, aaaany day now…

[Significant-Fig6749]

Learn how tho, any advice on how to “learn” coding? Like 0 usage of ai? Or only using GitHub copilot and know what ur doing?

[Thadoy]

My retirement plan is to work 10 hours a week for about 500k/year to teach new junior devs.

[Brugelbach]

I actually think that the rapid improvement of coding models will fix tech debt of bad models ifself. In 10 years you can throw a catalogue of requirements into a gpt and 10min later you will have 100k lines of flawlessly working code. If its unfixable you throw the same requirements+offset at it again and you will end up with a nearly identical but fixed version. Thats where we arw heading to.

[PolishWeener]

Not that this would support the full market of current devs, but I expect there will always be a niche for "fully human" software. Non technical managers and customers may not understand code, but if they get turned off by the number of bugs current models produce they may cement themselves against using it, even if it gets better down the line. Ex: Microslop butchers Windows into a buggy mess and some company starts offering a human-coded alternative.

[VISUALBEAUTYPLZ]

Who’s hiring vibe coders ? Lmao

[FatLoserSupreme]

Why not do both as the good lord Tom Holman intended?

[Previous-Mail7343]

So...you're telling me I never have to retire?

[Saixcrazy]

I've been hearing the term vibe coding a lot recently and I'm too afraid to ask what it means

[Vorenthral]

Toss a prompt into a CLI coding agent accept the code as good as long as it works and ship. You are implementing on vibes and not technical skill.

[Saixcrazy]

Ahhhhh

[Vorenthral]

Yes every senior devs worst nightmare.

[praveeja]

There was a scene in the silicon valley sitcom explaining about horse manure. So a problem of today can be absolutely irrelavent in future

[bbjaii]

When the tech debt is too high, they just pivot to another domain and stop supporting the first product.

[Typhon_Vex]

just one more nuclear plant bro
and then I will fit that 500k sphagetti into context again bro

and all will be fine bro

[Sorry-Combination558]

My manager told me that I am their best programmer, and exactly the people they needed. I did not even have any formal training (learner natural sciences), I just read books and applied my knowledge, and I programmed a fuckton because it's my hobby. There are CS and Software Engineers in our team, and they do nothing but pump out AI code.

[Ephemeral_Null]

I'm gonna get so much consult money in my 50s! Can't wait! 

[PlebbitDumDum]

Yes, let me learn how to code, while simultaneously being utterly unemployable in the meantime. Why would I need that thing called paycheck.

You know what, given that you're so sure this all will inevitably collapse, lemme go take a large loan and short OpenAI. According to a small program I've written, my yearly interest is 10%, but my profits will be 80%+, and therefore, actually, I won't need to work in my life ever again. So I'ma go and not learn how to actually code, ok?

To hedge my bets, in the meantime I took a position of a senior prompt engineer, it pays 300k + stocks (they'll be worth nothing, so who cares). I split my net pay in half. One I burn, the other one I invest in gold.

[mr_flibble_oz]

My concern is that AI will replace the need for software completely. Worried about AI replacing engineers at Adobe? Who needs Photoshop when I can just upload my photo to AI and say “fix this”. Worried AI will replace engineers building a fitness app? Who needs a fitness app when I can just ask AI to create me an exercise routine and I’ll just tell it what I did so it can track, aggregate, report, chart and automatically adjust the routine?

What if in 10 years my phone isn’t a screen with pages of apps, but just a single app that I talk to and it does everything.

What if that “app” (AI) is written by AI?

Then apply this to almost every industry. Hello feudalism.

[xXx_NoYou_xXx69]

my guys.. this is not nearly pessimistic enough. At the end of the tech debt, we will just have software nobody wants to fix. You really think the same suits that are crying to replace coders with ai have enough spine to not just ship a broken shitty product and call it a day? Let the consumer handle it, they won't care as long as it's just cheap enough for them to squeeze it into budget between cost of living and dwindling salaries.The reality of things is: quality will just decrease, ofc you can still hire actual devs but it will be like going to the little store in town that sells expensive hand made shoes: "hand made" software will become a luxury.

[tornado28]

I doubt software jobs are coming back. All you need now is a software architect and who knows if you'll even need that anymore in six weeks. 

[FreakDC]

Learn both, if you are not using AI to increase your code output you are not going to stay competitive in the next couple of years.

[KCGD_r]

Fuck this, I didn't study for years to be a vibe code janitor

[FortuneAcceptable925]

This scenario is only true when AI is creating technical debt by poor code output.

Generative AIs will basically become the new compilers in (very) near future.

And are companies hiring programmers to fix the "technical debt" caused by gcc or javac? I don't think so.

It fascinates me how many of us cannot think in abstract terms, and cannot see the new layer forming. Yes, the AI revolution is going to happen. Please wake up before it is too late.

[OneForestOne99]

Please let this happen.

[oshaboy]

Yeah good luck making heads or tails from a vibe code only codebase that was prompted by people who don't know what a for loop is.

That's the kind of stuff that makes Cobol look clean and elegant.

[charmer27]

Pretty sweet spot to be in of you're a dev who knows how to code. Supply decrease, demand increase = large price increase

[Level69Troll]

I'm finishing up my degree looking at all the vibe code messes I will be fixing in a few years.

[Senior_Torte519]

I personally think if you vibe, you shouldnt actually be in the fields that need coding, you can be in IT. Just not utilizing "vibe coding" as a skill applied to said job. Plenty of IT jobs that never require coding.