after reading so many people argue about this over the last few years (and having had my own experience - I've been writing software professionally for close to 15 years), I've come to believe people are talking past each other because different people enjoy or excel at different aspects of coding.
at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details.
then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing.
yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.
took me a week to build a poker bot in 2006 that earned me $1000 a week during college, and that was self imposed because I didn't want to raise any flags.
It was based on a world of warcraft bot that I modified, and I learned a lot during the process.
What you call wasted mechanical work I call the foundations of a career that changed my life.
Take away the AI and this guy has nothing but an idea. An old idea that has already been done to death, and none of the skills required to actually implement it and maintain it.
You might not like writing code, but that is the job no matter how many natural language layers you put on top of it.
Just to make a small addition to my comment, which also addresses the sibling and child replies.
I 100% agree that any good professional still needs (with or without AI) the "design, engineer, and knowledge of your constraints". I'm not arguing against that. Those are, in fact, part of what I find most fun about programming, and the reason why I fought through the typing boredom since I was 13. I'm also not a vibe coder.
I'm just saying all of that is somewhat orthogonal to the typing of code itself. With strong typing (as in type theory - I still write the types, sometimes signatures for interfaces, etc) and other tooling, you really can get a lot done by delegating the bulk of the implementation to these tools.
If someone makes a 3D printer for houses there is probably someone who will say laying bricks "is the real job"
It's just someone writing about his vibe coding experience. Not interesting for me, but then again I stopped reading half way and am not telling people to stop.
The 3D printer analogy doesn't hold up though, that implies design, engineer, and knowledge of your constraints.
It's more like a pachinko machine that rewards the user with house like objects that may or may not work.
If the user builds their house with it and it collapses and kills their family fine, but you can't use a system like that to build anything where you might have external liability because fundamentally you don't understand the problem domain and an ai model cannot hold a civil engineering license and be held liable for structural collapse.
at the very least, there's people who enjoy the experience of hand-crafting software - typing, being "in the zone", thinking slowly through the details.
then there are others, like me, who enjoy thinking abstractly about the pieces and how they fit together. might as well be doing algebraic topology. nothing bores me more than having to type precise but arbitrary syntax for 5 hrs (assuming you've decided to use the brain capacity to memorize it), and having to fight compiler/small logic errors throughout. I like the thinking, not the doing.
yes, we havent needed AI to build this for decades. we did however need to waste a hell of a lot of time doing essentially physical, mechanical work with your fingers.