Here’s a lovely article by Paul Ford in the New York Times about what vibe coding (agentic, whatever) means and how it could meaningfully disrupt the software industry. I enjoyed this much more than the drastically more hyperbolic Matt “Something big is coming, get your finances in order” Shumer piece, which is still worth a read if you haven’t yet.
I could (and will, incessantly, to anyone attending a class I teach) cite entire chunks of paragraphs that I enjoyed, but here’s a few:
November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful — but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.
[…] right now, excited developers are overextending themselves to the point of burnout, obsessively coding all the time.
This is so true. With agentic coding tools, you really can just do things. The problem now, however, is how to stop doing things. I now have 6-10 projects I do concurrently, and I feel bad every time I don’t have an agent running, I keep spending money on AI subscriptions, I spend all my time reading X about AI developments while waiting for my agents to code, my day job is suffering, send help please
All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited.
My industry is famous for saying no, or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. I could teach you now to make a complex web app in a few weeks. In about six months you could do a lot of things that took me 20 years to learn. I’m writing all kinds of code I never could before — but you can too. If we can’t stop the freight train, we could at least hop on for a ride.
The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then all the people who tell me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.
AI could never write like this. (Well, it probably could, when the NYT stops suing OpenAI, then this article will be ingested into the borg.)