Half a day into my vibe coding class, I found myself teaching participants about APIs, private keys, databases, CRUD, and edge functions — things I’d only normally cover after 6-10 days of intro web.
And everyone did fine directing their LLMs to set up CRUD, incorporate API keys into the back-end, and much more; all without knowing a lick of HTML, CSS, JS, React, or TypeScript.
Which makes me wonder if programming instructors are like driving instructors at a point in the past. We might be at that point where driving instructors saw their learners taking to driving with automatic transmissions, since all they wanted was to get from Point A to Point B, and didn’t feel the need to learn everything about internal combustion and gear shifts and stalling, even as their instructors wanted to teach them the ALL-IMPORTANT FUNDAMENTALS — conceptual knowledge and practical skills which the instructors loved and enjoyed and had gotten really good at.
So the fundamentals as we know them just… aren’t, any more? That’s quite a shift (sorry) to process. I’m sure we’ll continue to have professional programmers — like how we have professional drivers who understand the ins and outs of torque and transmission — but it’s nice too that everyone else is now enabled to just get where they want to go.
