Back in the GPT-4 era, I was already hearing that as a mainstream view.

From another angle, maybe LLMs are the Python of the future — which is also a view many people hold. In the 1970s, assembly programmers accused C programmers of not truly understanding the underlying processor. In the 1990s, C programmers similarly accused Python programmers of knowing nothing about how computers actually work. Vibe coders are simply the Python programmers of a new era.

The biggest difference is that, unlike a compiler with clearly defined outputs, vibe coding is far more flexible. The barrier to computing has been getting lower and lower. In the Fortran era, programmers were called scientists. The barrier to writing code keeps dropping, and in the future software may be able to modify its own functionality in response to a single sentence from a user. As for professional programmers — especially the vast majority below the very top tier who spend their time talking about CRUD — what happens to them in the future? Only God knows.

The junior engineer role isn’t going away. It’s just evolving. It’ll likely shift toward things like code analysis, reviewing work, and managing projects with AI tools. It’s similar to when we moved from hand-coded HTML to visual UI builders: the html code might not look perfect(it's actually crappy) , but it gets the job done. Over time, we’ll get better code management tools that will make code easier for everyone to understand. It sucks for the glut of coders that will need to adapt. But that's not new. How many web sites are written in perl, now? Did perl developers disappear? Some, but most moved on to other languages. That’s just how things progress.

Soon we'll have more programming projects popping up. It will now be financially profitable to create smaller projects that were losers before which will create new jobs. Or much more bigger project that could never be built before. So, AI won't take all coding jobs, they will evolve.

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