From that perspective, development has always been harder since I started. I left college with a copy of K&R and remembering courses that applied to real life immediately, because data structures and such were just what we had. In my first job, I ended up writing a code generator to help serialize a large number of data structures, straight from a compiler design class.. which right now you don't need to know a thing about, because serialization and languages with introspection are everywhere. The knowledge you need to be a professional engineer just kept going up through the last 30 years, while most of the basics became far less relevant, because the libraries just did it.

AI raises the bar again, as its probably at least as good as me, if not better, at anything I learned in college. I've spent years living off of random trivia from the last 30 years, as I saw computing grow with me. How do you know this?! Because everything built on top of it didn't exist when I was your age, so I had to learn it! But well, nowadays the AI is better at that trivia too.

The world moves, we do what we can with what we kno. It's not just programming, but what innovation and automation has done to the vast majority of things humans have done to be productive for each other since humans are people. We'll have to cope, like the guy that bred oxes to pull the plows.

> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!

This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.

Also, even if the premise behind the SaaSpocalypse is naive and oversimplified (companies aren't going to replace all their SaaSes with internally vibe-coded replacements), it looks reasonable that net-net AI will have a negative impact on the value of software.

That's true but in a way it's also more fun and engaging because the tedious stuff just gets worked through leaving you to think about the bigger picture items.

Though I'll say I don't buy the stuff about AI "democratizing" development since making it much more capital-intensive kind of has the opposite effect for anybody doing dev work at home.

That's a roundabout way of saying it makes software development easier. Perhaps even a 180.

But yes - once it's that easy you have to step up your ambitions.

I worry this is looking at where the ball is now instead of where it's going. The recent disproof of an Erdos conjecture should put to rest the idea that LLMs will reach a skill ceiling before they reach superintelligence.

I believe we are headed for a world of superintelligent AI where LLMs are much better at logical thinking than humans, the same way that chess engines are much better at chess than humans.

In that world there's really nothing humans can offer in terms of logical thinking other than their humanity itself. An 8 year old with Stockfish can beat Magnus Carlsen, and an 8 year old with Codex (and daddy's credit card) will be able to beat me at software engineering.

> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job

I'm not worried about non-technical vibe coders taking my job. I'm worried about psychotic VCs and CEOs putting me on the street in the name of "optimization" of "lower value human capital".

I had the same thought recently, I've had it happen to myself.

I've been working on something relatively large and greenfield recently.

A big chunk of my time is spent thinking about the hard parts. The raw information processing rate needed to keep up with the state of the project is high.

It feels almost like mental athleticism, whereas coding used to be a rather chill activity.

developers now are expected to randomly jump around projects and ship without friction. For employers it means they can move us around like pawns. Lot of companies have not reorged themselves to this new type of workforce thats much more malleable.

it used to be that i pay your due at some enterpise and learn some corner of codebase really well and become go to person. that would give you job security.

You will never beat the vibe coders.

The vibe coders have a key advantage you don’t: they don’t give a fuck.

They blow through a task and move onto the next one. Management sees this as progress, and the vibe coders are rewarded.

When shit breaks later on down the line, and fires have to be put out and things rewritten, the vibe coders do NOT get the blame. They do NOT get punished. Most engineering teams operate on a blameless culture. If code was approved for production, then it should have been good enough. Vibe coders will keep on doing what they do, and skilled experts will be left cleaning up their messes.

For anyone who actually cares, it’s over. You are not steering development anymore.

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Not really. The primary stopper was never time or effort. It was need (and wisdom). If a project was important enough, you’d do it. If it’s not, it falls on the wayside.

Now with LLM tools, what you got is a slew of projects their creators aren’t even interested in. It’s theater.

That’s the trick - always stay hard!