I dunno about the Glad bag analogy, and now I'm not sure that the artist analogy applies either.

I think a better analogy (i.e. one that we both agree one) is Excel preadsheets.

There are very few "Excel consultants" available that companies hire. You can't make money be providing solutions in Excel because anyone who needs something that can be done in Excel can just do it themselves.

It's like if your mum needed to sum income and expenditures for a little side-business: she won't be hiring an excel consultant to do write the formulas into the 4 - 6 cells that contain calculations, she'll simply do it herself.

I think vibe coding is going to be the same way in a few years (much faster than spreadsheets took off, btw, which occurred over a period of a decade) - someone who needs a little project management applications isn't going to buy one, they can get one in an hour "for free"[1].

Just about anything you can vibe-code, an office worker with minimal training (the average person in 2026, for example) can vibe-code. The skill barrier to vibe-coding little apps like this is less than the skill barrier for creating Excel workbooks, and yet almost every office worker does it.

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[1] In much the same way that someone considers creating a new spreadsheet to be free when they already have Excel installed, people are going to regard the output of LLMs "free" because they are already paying the monthly fee for it.