alt Hacker News> In the end it will be the users sculpting formal systems like playdoh.
And unless the user is a competent programmer, at least in spirit, it will look like the creation of the 3-year-old next door, not like Wallace and Gromit.
It may be fine, but the difference is that one is only loved by their parents, the other gets millions of people to go to the theater.
Play-Doh gave the power of sculpting to everyone, including small children, but if you don't want to make an ugly mess, you have to be a competent sculptor to begin with, and it involves some fundamentals that does not depend on the material. There is a reason why clay animators are skilled professionals.
The quality of vibe coded software is generally proportional to the programming skills of the vibe coder as well as the effort put into it, like with all software.
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so agentic play-doh sculpting
challenge accepted
It really depends what kind of time frame we're talking about.
As far as today's models, these are best understood as tools to be used as humans. They're only replacements for humans insofar as individual developers can accomplish more with the help of an AI than they could alone, so a smaller team can accomplish what used to require a bigger team. Due to Jevon's paradox this is probably a good thing for developer salaries: their skills are now that much more in demand.
But you have to consider the trajectory we're on. GPT went from an interesting curiosity to absolutely groundbreaking in less than five years. What will the next five years bring? Do you expect development to speed up, slow down, stay the course, or go off in an entirely different direction?
Obviously, the correct answer to that question is "Nobody knows for sure." We could be approaching the top of a sigmoid type curve where progress slows down after all the easy parts are worked out. Or maybe we're just approaching the base of the real inflection point where all white collar work can be accomplished better and more cheaply by a pile of GPUs.
Since the future is uncertain, a reasonable course of action is probably to keep your own coding skills up to date, but also get comfortable leveraging AI and learning its (current) strengths and weaknesses.