The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
If you think other professions aren’t sloppy, you haven’t seen the average practitioner. Blissfully unaware of their own incompetence. At least engineers have metrology.
I am aware that not everyone goes about their work with pride and passion.
My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
What did you expect when writing software became a job though?
A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking.
You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say!
I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
Can you start naming them? Because most of the life altering ones have certifications, licensures, and continuing education programs when becoming a lawyer/doctor/engineer. Unless you're trying to argue the need to regulate software developers, then I agree completely. For far too long developers have treated products way to poorly and we see what a lack of regulations has brought upon society.
I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.
At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out".
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, describing, dictating, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
Bill Gates is a known Epstein associate, had sex with a woman likely against their will while being tracked by Epstein, and had to drug his wife unknowingly to her so she wouldn't get a sexually transmitted disease he caught while having sex with said woman on said island.
This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it.
Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
i dont know how this works, but i am super interested that if there's this wall where so much software is ai written, that ai becomes the only thing making its future training data, could the 'engine' 'stall'?
or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?
again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line
Well, vibecoding, as the name says, is about the vibes. “Make me a todo app that feels minimalist, with cool animations”. Boom, ship it (and probably forget about it).
Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.
> as a term, is supposed to denote a human-in-the-loop..... But how much longer will that be true?
Why do you think Claude claims its work on git is co-authored, and now has started putting links to the transcript showing your working. It's about sending a message to the one paying your salary that all your real input in the creation was a few messages and you're replaceable in that equation.
People dont like any dating, they want to be past it into a long term healthy relationship mostly. If they could blink and get there they would choose it. So yes. The analogy is even better than even better than stated. Nearly everyone cares about the outcome while very few care and enjoy the process
I don't know about online dating, but I think the vibe coders I've interacted with the past few years break down into two distinct groups:
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
I don't know if I would call myself a vibe coder, but I definitely feel shame about putting any llm-generated code online unless I've reviewed it to the point of it being what I would've have written on my own anyway.
So lots of personal one-off tools/dashbooards that I never would have made before will probably live forever on my personal git server instead of github or somewhere.
Sharing anything that has even a whiff of being machine generated opens you up to huge amounts of scorn and derision. It happens in the comment section of nearly every post on this site. If that's not the community here using shame as a mechanism of control, I don't know what is.
I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.
there was a mild stigma around "i met her on facebook". a negative spin would be like: it's like you're stalking random women, and you must not have much luck or courage to approach women. but facebook wasn't exactly a dating app, so.
I think OP's point was that most people are using agenetic coding, but they're ashamed to admit it. They play down and minimise how much they're doing it, roll their eyes at it when talking with friends, and agree just how much nicer it is to write code the "normal" way (like, at a bar! at the dog park! I was sitting at a cafe, reading Knuth, and this gorgeous code just came up and started chatting to me...)
This is certainly the case in the field of bioinformatics right now, so I do feel it's a little apt.
(HN is a bit of a bubble - it's about the only place on the internet where you can be cautiously positive about agenting coding and not be abused.)
in 2 years nobody is going to read their code, much less write it.
programming will gradually become a lost skill, like cobol or writing assembly. some people will still do it in specialized environments for a while longer, most wont. first it will feel like skill atrophy to the coder, then it will feel obsolete - programming by hand will become a worse way to program. ill advised, like rolling your own encryption or security today.
I half wonder if we wouldn't have this giant compute supply crunch/environmental damage/energy crisis and tech oligopoly situation if someone would've just written better English to Code translation for LLVM instead...
The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
For tools I want to have I don’t care. For hobby projects I’ll happily code. The want ebbs and flows.
If you think other professions aren’t sloppy, you haven’t seen the average practitioner. Blissfully unaware of their own incompetence. At least engineers have metrology.
I am aware that not everyone goes about their work with pride and passion.
My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
What did you expect when writing software became a job though?
A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking.
You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say!
I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
Can you start naming them? Because most of the life altering ones have certifications, licensures, and continuing education programs when becoming a lawyer/doctor/engineer. Unless you're trying to argue the need to regulate software developers, then I agree completely. For far too long developers have treated products way to poorly and we see what a lack of regulations has brought upon society.
I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.
At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out".
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
>To not accept the new reality
Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.
A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, describing, dictating, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
Bill Gates is a known Epstein associate, had sex with a woman likely against their will while being tracked by Epstein, and had to drug his wife unknowingly to her so she wouldn't get a sexually transmitted disease he caught while having sex with said woman on said island.
This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it.
Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget
I won't cry false analogy but I just have no clue what point you're trying to make.
Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?
If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
i dont know how this works, but i am super interested that if there's this wall where so much software is ai written, that ai becomes the only thing making its future training data, could the 'engine' 'stall'?
or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?
again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line
Well, vibecoding, as the name says, is about the vibes. “Make me a todo app that feels minimalist, with cool animations”. Boom, ship it (and probably forget about it).
Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.
> as a term, is supposed to denote a human-in-the-loop..... But how much longer will that be true?
Why do you think Claude claims its work on git is co-authored, and now has started putting links to the transcript showing your working. It's about sending a message to the one paying your salary that all your real input in the creation was a few messages and you're replaceable in that equation.
People use online dating because they feel like they have to, but most people hate it. So maybe the analogy is even better than stated.
When online dating goes well, it quickly turns into ordinary dating.
And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.
People dont like any dating, they want to be past it into a long term healthy relationship mostly. If they could blink and get there they would choose it. So yes. The analogy is even better than even better than stated. Nearly everyone cares about the outcome while very few care and enjoy the process
I didn't have the impression anyone felt ashamed of dating online back in the days and I don't have the impression vibe coders feel any shame today.
I don't know about online dating, but I think the vibe coders I've interacted with the past few years break down into two distinct groups:
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I think this is a very outdated perspective.
I don't plan things. I braindump context to the agent let it implement something, and iterate from there (A LOT).
Planning was for an era where implementation was expensive.
>term inherently belittling what they make
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
I don't know if I would call myself a vibe coder, but I definitely feel shame about putting any llm-generated code online unless I've reviewed it to the point of it being what I would've have written on my own anyway.
So lots of personal one-off tools/dashbooards that I never would have made before will probably live forever on my personal git server instead of github or somewhere.
Sharing anything that has even a whiff of being machine generated opens you up to huge amounts of scorn and derision. It happens in the comment section of nearly every post on this site. If that's not the community here using shame as a mechanism of control, I don't know what is.
I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.
there was a mild stigma around "i met her on facebook". a negative spin would be like: it's like you're stalking random women, and you must not have much luck or courage to approach women. but facebook wasn't exactly a dating app, so.
Bit of a strange analogy to use since dating companies are in decline right now with difficulties attracting and retaining a gen-z audience.
And generally online dating is seen a subpar form of dating that fails to deliver meaningful relationships. A very strange analogy indeed....
Or a very informative one, depends on your outlook on AI use really.
All coding will be AI, AI is just a tool. Under a catchy headline.
How about: "Vibe coding is like genital lice"?
Thats like the same point the article is making
I think OP's point was that most people are using agenetic coding, but they're ashamed to admit it. They play down and minimise how much they're doing it, roll their eyes at it when talking with friends, and agree just how much nicer it is to write code the "normal" way (like, at a bar! at the dog park! I was sitting at a cafe, reading Knuth, and this gorgeous code just came up and started chatting to me...)
This is certainly the case in the field of bioinformatics right now, so I do feel it's a little apt.
(HN is a bit of a bubble - it's about the only place on the internet where you can be cautiously positive about agenting coding and not be abused.)
in 2 years nobody is going to read their code, much less write it. programming will gradually become a lost skill, like cobol or writing assembly. some people will still do it in specialized environments for a while longer, most wont. first it will feel like skill atrophy to the coder, then it will feel obsolete - programming by hand will become a worse way to program. ill advised, like rolling your own encryption or security today.
I half wonder if we wouldn't have this giant compute supply crunch/environmental damage/energy crisis and tech oligopoly situation if someone would've just written better English to Code translation for LLVM instead...