Coding on 8 and 16 bit home computers still required some skills that most vibe coders certainly lack.

> most programmers and hobbyists could code without the need of a University or a Corporation.

I don't think so. Back then, the pool of people doing such a thing basically self-selected for intelligent, motivated types who were capable of learning on their own. The new "programmers" "programming" via Claude Code are going to be very different from those hobbyists you're talking about.

> I’m sure others heard the same when JavaScript and Python became near ubiquitous. When PHP emerged.

You heard right! Most JavaScript and PHP in the world _is_ profoundly shitty. It's taken 20 years of intense research to make JavaScript compilers that are almost good enough to mostly optimize away the design foibles of the language.

There are different magnitudes of shitty.

Also we went from compilers with an IDE that had a debugger, profiler, built-in help and would fit on a 3.5" disk and would load on machines with 640KiB RAM (Turbo Pascal) to chat apps or password managers that are hundreds of megabytes and regularly gobble up more than a gigabyte of memory because they ship with their own browser.

Something is lost along the way.

To be fair with how powerful our computers are, it's a pity that electron apps like bitwarden, spotify are so slow and consume so much resources. I do miss the time when a lot of apps were snappy

Maybe it’s a process. Many of the transitions you mentioned did bring shitty apps (not all of them, the ones replacing tech for tech were mostly ok, the ones democratizing dev did come with a quality drop), but eventually Darwinism will take effect and trim the long tail.

Coding per se is not hard. Proper engineering is. I do hope this change brings a change in focus (people train in algorithms, efficiency, solid development patterns) but I am afraid it won’t be the case.

"With a punchcard at least, I can verify what the input is! Unlike those new 'transistors' that are so unreliable!"

At least some of the projects in these industries now specify strict no-AI-use policies in contracts. I participate in a few of these, and it’s becoming a bit of a pain, because all dev tool vendors insist on adding AI features, and if there’s no way to turn them off completely we have to migrate away.

However, the temptation of productivity gains are strong, and few of the customers look into relaxing these rules.

The good thing is we've learned this already from cloud. When one AWS region is degraded we all failover to other regions, and then other cloud providers, right? ...right?

Thinking, yes, but also secrets, access and effective control of important services in every country and company worldwide, centralized in the US (or anywhere else) where the NSA can take the driver's seat at any time. "AI" is the ultimate sleeper agent.