I see it already happening at my own company with my moron manager thinking that he now too can be a programmer without any coding knowledge.

> drive demand for highly skilled software engineers

"lol no"

the plan is to get something that's good enough to stop paying hundreds of thousands a year to highly skilled people, and just pay minimum wage to a vibe coder. Why would you need to be highly skilled to use an automated coding tool? When factories are automated, they require LESS skilled jobs because the more a machine does, the less a human needs to do.

When in human history has this ever happened?

"So it's going to drive demand for more software creation, and that's going to drive demand for highly skilled software engineers who can do it..."

No it's not. It can only work by reducing demand for human programmers, it would break itself if there was a net increase. You don't cool yourself off on a hot day by taking a hot bath and drinking coffee.

"There's so much software that isn't created today because we can't prioritize it,"

Then why isn't there demand for more programmers already?

"That's simply not happening. The quality is not there. The robustness is not there. The scalability and security of the code is not there,"

It's not there WITHOUT "vibe coding" either, because those skills aren't valued by a large part of the market for new software.

"These tools reward highly skilled technical professionals who already know what 'good' looks like."

Except these people don't exist and any motivation to produce them will be destroyed by the use of AI to eliminate their jobs.

"We definitely want to make it very clear that the responsibility, at the end of the day, is in the hands of the engineers."

AND NOT US, the creators of vibe programming tools!

"Wu said she's told her younger sister, who's still in college, that software engineering is still a great career and worth studying."

Right, because 20-something experts on such consequential matters isn't the core of the problem.

It means you will will employ vibe coders to prompt and process AI generated filler .... then employ programmers to get it to actually work

Usually this involves throwing away most of the AI generated code, so you employ more people to do the same work, and pay for AI

What strikes me as curious about this hypothesis is that it has been the case for decades . It wasn't "AI"; normally some combination of overgrown Excel sheets and garbage-tier Access by the more technical of whatever the mostly nontechnical user population happened to be to deal with needs that didn't get developer attention. And, for the most part, they still didn't get developer attention.

I suppose that there is a slim possibility that this 'vibe coding' will somehow convince management in ways that Ac

My former boss used to say that he knew enough programming to be dangerous (and sysadmin, etc)

But he knew it, so he left it to us professionals to do the work most of the time. AI just gives people the tools to be dangerous, without them actually understanding much of anything. And any jobs to clean up their work will slowly be learned by AI to do a good enough job most of the time until that one critical disaster happens.

Luckily, I was working for NASA, and they have rules for critical systems.... but mo

between tech mentality and user mentality. "Vibe coding" is the dream of users/managers, but will always be out of reach, because users can't understand details, and always demand magical leaps from what they imagine to what is reasonably possible within real world constraints.

What will happen is we will create a new layer of vibe coding grifters who will promise the moon and deliver green cheese. Caveat emptor.

That's you. That's what you sound like.

Is it just me, or has the author of this article never heard of the [1]Broken Window Fallacy [wikipedia.org]?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

Clearly the programmers haven't woken up yet :)

The hypothesis is probably a correct one, although I am still wondering exactly where AI will land in the grand scheme of things.

It's obvious the intention of management types is to replace highly skilled engineers with lower paid vibe coders. The MBAs would love nothing more than that. But as the author hypothesized, I'm guessing the most high folks will be the entry level positions. Exactly where that lands, I'm not sure. Is it a 10% replacement? 5%? 25%? Will we ultimately not change the number of engineers needed and just their overall output goes up by a few points? My guess is the latter, and definitely not this promised utopia of "we can finally not hire all of these overpaid software engineers!". Just like this ultimately didn't happen with the cloud + BYOD shift in the 2010s. The largest push for cloud, devops, and BYOD was to get rid of both on-prem datacenters AND to get rid of IT folks. But what ultimately happened is that software development organizations realized that IT operations is a distinct set of skills, so instead they created the "SRE"--which is a fancily-renamed operations person in a software development org. Oh, and the average SRE makes 2-3x as much money as the IT ops folks they replaced.

Given the way LLMs work I highly doubt wholesale replacing entire large chunks of software engineers is going to be a thing anytime soon. Most interestingly is the fact that LLMs can only know what we have already put out there, and we'll basically need to continually train newer models with more information. As technology changes, give it another 5-10 years, and today's LLMs may be in fact completely useless. Particularly as sites like Stack Overflow's knowledge becomes more obsolete.

I liken LLMs to the know-it-all at a bar. They speak like they know everything about everything, but you're just trying to get drunk in a bar and don't feel like correcting them. They might have most of the answers to that night's trivia game, but if you deep dive any particular area they're going to make up a bunch of bullshit to avoid saying "I don't know." Unfortunately (or fortunately?) the world doesn't run on such people. Jim Bob's trivia knowledge doesn't architect and engineer buildings, bridges, roads, nor would you trust him for the bar's financials. You don't ask Jim Bob how many drinks you sold in a night, "oh around 1000 or so" when your livelihood depends on knowing that you actually sold 1315 drinks. And the rest of the world isn't going to let you use Jim Bob's guesstimates to pay your taxes, "Well Jim Bob said we sold around 1000 drinks so we paid taxes on 1000 drinks worth of income!"

There's going to be *some* AI impact, but I doubt it'll be as revolutionary as the smart phone.

The BCS is a feature of many small businesses. It usually starts out as an ad hoc attempt to understand where money went, and eventually metastasizes into a parallel accounting/inventory/time management/asset tracker/exercise reminder system.

Usually built by the owner, sometimes the bookkeeper, an important aspect is only the author understands it well enough to change it. Others might be allowed to enter stuff in specific places, but otherwise altering the BCS will result in months of recrimination.

One w

We have been lucky so far. Moore's "law" has been holding true. However, we are getting to a point with nanometer sizes where we can't go any further, as we can't go less than an atom. When we hit diminishing returns on performance that persist unless major ISA changes are done, optimizing software to use resources is something that is going to be a difficult climb. People can do it, but this may be something AI isn't great at. For example, hand-tuned assembly still rules the roost, even after decades

That is basically economics: the cheaper something becomes, the higher the consumption. But if the effectiveness comes from automating manual steps, those who did that will be unemployed. The manual steps in programming, AI can make more effective, are looking up manuals and tutorials etc and suggest how to make the basic and generic programs. The new stuff still need experts. Therefore, one can predict, that we see more demand for high-level coders, who actually make new stuff, and less demand for people m

No, stealing the hard work of others, and selling it as a service, to put the people who wrote it on the unemployment lines--is not going to help the job market.

...the clueless to create trivial, insecure, buggy code.

Meanwhile, experts are creating and using powerful tools that will allow them to write much better code.

The fantasy of writing code in common language is strong, but common language is far too imprecise and creating complex systems is hard, regardless of the language used

AIas written and deployed is harming our society.