Should we hate vibe coders?
It’s a really f****ing scary time to be a developer
Over the past 6 months I’ve made 21 videos making fun of vibe coders. It’s easy pickings - from your product manager who vibe coded an app but has no idea what a “test” is, to some guy on your LinkedIn feed who wants you to check out his website on localhost:3000.
If you aren’t a developer yourself you might not quite understand why so many people enjoy these jokes or why I keep bothering to make them in the first place. So let me explain.
Imagine you have been training your entire life to be a violinist. Every day you show up to rehearsal with a group of people who all had to pass 5 rounds of interviews - er, auditions - to join the orchestra. Then one day, 700 people walk in off the street into your rehearsal and claim they’re vibe violinists. They break instruments, they sound horrible, they clutter up your Twitter feed with recordings of their “work.”
You and your real violinist friends laugh and trade stories of how these people don’t know the difference between the tailpiece and the fingerboard.
But then one day, not that many days later, something terrifying happens. You hear a beautiful tune, and turn around to find a vibe violinist playing it.
And certainly, you think to yourself, that shouldn’t be possible without a foundational music education. That shouldn’t be possible when they’re not even holding a violin the right way. You listen a while longer until in a blink, they falter, they lose the melody.
And so you turn back to your real violinist friends and you laugh at how these nincompoops thought they could play just like real violinists. You laugh and you laugh and all the while you feel a tingle of anxiety along your scalp.
It’s a really fucking scary time to be a developer. That’s the truth of it.
Whether vibe coders actually start applying for developer roles, or AI automates those roles away altogether, vibe coders are the embodiment of the end of the traditional coding career - at least in the way many of us have come to know it.
And actually, it’s really quite normal to hate the person who’s trying to take your job. It’s actually really quite normal to hate the guy who’s trying to take your spot in the orchestra while trying to play his instrument upside down.
But I think we all know deep down it isn’t his fault that he doesn’t know the difference between Beethoven and Britney. Being able to code is an amazing opportunity and at the end of the day I find it hard to fault someone for wanting to use all of the tools available to them to actualize their ideas.
Many developers, myself included, are of the opinion that AI tools may almost entirely take over the job of coding very soon, leaving developers in a place where their primary job is directing AI agents, debugging when things go wrong, and designing higher level systems.
In a lot of ways this future is hopeful. It’s a future of less leetcode, a future where junior engineers don’t spend their early twenties bogged down by obscure Rust syntax and instead get to learn more “senior” skills more quickly.
But it’s also a future where you might end up being a vibe conductor of a vibe orchestra.
Don’t worry, when that happens I’ll make sure to start posting videos making fun of you too.
I think the label 'vibe' coder is an insult enough :D
Thank you for so wonderfully articulating the existential terror, of having one's hunter/gatherer skills rendered useless, so quickly.
I think it's easy to see the opportunities (we) coders personally stand to lose, in our work roles; it's harder to see what we would do instead. Relevant parallel:
A friend created some visual effects software, that (among many other capabilities) handled lots of motion keyframing.
At trade shows, traditional animators would come yell at him! "You're killing my business, I got PAID to draw those tween frames!"
My friend's response, paraphrased (with abandon): "Yeah, but...You didn't get into animation to draw tween frames. What bigger, more bigger, more important creative work can you realistically take on, now that we're taking care of the keyframing?"
The animator didn't have a ready answer, and I don't think many coders do either.
Those potential future duties you wrote about ("directing AI agents, debugging when things go wrong, and designing higher level systems") likely sound unappealing to many current coders. [I may be projecting, haha.]
Great work, keep it up!