I'm not saying there is a technical obstacle, I'm saying there's a practical obstacle that LLMs and vibecoding don't overcome.

The evidence isn't in that it failed but why it failed. It's not that the problem was more difficult than they anticipated, it's that they didn't comprehend the nature of the problem they were solving from the outset. Software development is an incremental creative activity that involves good taste, constantly shifting and vague requirements, and keen understanding of human factors and ergonomics. LLMs fail at all three. And in fact the shifting and ambiguous requirement element is fatal to the notion of automating the process.

Outsourcing and oop and uml and LLMs and vibecoding --- they're all the same futile attempt at the same thing: abstracting the human out of a loop built for the benefit of humans. It's nonsensical, and the only people who want to do it are capitalists, so it's doomed to fail yet again.

Fair enough, I agree. The process of one or more people figuring out what is actually needed is a big part of the outcome, I'd consider an important social obstacle or limit to automation.

But here's what's important to my point:

  > abstracting the [worker] human out of a loop built for the benefit of [customer] humans

So, rather than wait for a technical wall to save us, or legally protect functionally replaceable jobs, or wait until people's lives implode, we should pressure our respective governments to decouple [2] the person's ability to survive from the ability to hold uninterrupted full-time employment. That's the only collective way forward that I see.

[1] We can even constrain it to existing roles: if a team of one requirements engineer, one full-stack dev/architect and LLMs can do the same job as a bigger team of specialized roles and coders, why would anyone pick the latter? I'd be happy to hear a technical or economic reason.

[2] My order of preference, preferably multiple: UBI, UBS, increased part-time work options, conditional non-basic income, union contracts, automation pauses, retraining, severance, temporarily subsidized bullshit jobs.