> Almost anyone can prompt an LLM to generate a thousand-line patch and submit it for code review. That’s no longer valuable. What’s valuable is contributing code that is proven to work.

That's really not a great development for us. If our main point is now reduced to accountability over the result with barely any involvement in the implementation - that's very little moat and doesn't command a high salary. Either we provide real value or we don't ...and from that essay I think it's not totally clear what the value is - it seems like every QA, junior SWE or even product manager can now do the job of prompting and checking the output.

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simonw 4 days ago | parent [-]

The value is being better at it than any QA or product manager.

Experienced software engineers have such a huge edge over everyone else with this stuff.

If your product manager doesn't understand what a CORS header is good luck having them produce a change that requires cross-domain fetch() call... and first they'll have to know what a "cross-doman fetch() call" means.

And sure they could ask an LLM about that, but they still need the vocabulary and domain knowledge to get to that question.

	▲	falcor84 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		That's an interesting argument, but from my industry experience, the average experienced QA Engineer and technical Product Manager both have better vocabulary than the average SWE. Indeed, I wonder whether a future curriculum for Vibe Engineering (to borrow your own term) may look more similar to that of present-day QA or Product curricula, than to a typical coding or CS curriculum.
	▲	throw1235435 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Nah; the only advantage that a software engineer has is that if they are experienced they've probably just a little bit bright. But their role will probably change to something other than a software engineer. Bright valuable people that care and are engaged are rare anyway. They may transition to a different role slowly (e.g. Product, QA, BA, etc) because they still offer value and know the domain, but it isn't traditional SWE. That's been disrupted by AI; I don't want it to be true and I'm hoping for something else; but reality is staring us in the face at the moment and it isn't fair to people to talk platitudes anymore. The fact that you have to write an article like this feels like defensive framing to me + illustrates what happens once a skill is devalued by people/society due to disruption; it proves to me where this is all heading. My thought on why people especially juniors are just delivering slop: Why bother with quality? Why bother with the craft? When it will be disrupted by the next tool/AI model/etc in the next few years anyway? Just think short term - will this slop get you through the PR and tick a short term box? If so success - might not have a job long term anyway due to all the AI stuff. In fact if I keep ticking boxes I'm more likely to last than the other person given more job incentives. Just get paid today. In your example a QA that is skilled at testing websites should pick up CORS issues for example. And the models will keep getting better and eventually give them harnesses too - and we SWE will slowly automate everything around this because the only lifeboat left for your career is to cash out hopefully by disrupting yourself (no unions, professional bodies, etc).