The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.

>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?

Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.

Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.

> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see.

As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.

Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.

If you think other professions aren’t sloppy, you haven’t seen the average practitioner. Blissfully unaware of their own incompetence. At least engineers have metrology.

I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.

Software developers/engineers build software - coding is a mean to an end.

The craft is about creating a tool that others use not some divine code that programmers stare at and admire.

You are confused that is why you are surprised.

Yeah i feel like most people (especially those who entered the workforce in the 2000s and later) just dont give a shit about their code. One of 30yo guys i work with (a good generalist) was recently complaining how most of these chucklefucks are just churning out darios of vibeslop docs and code (darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds) that they dont understand.

> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.

I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing.

These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone.

I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.

>Apply the same question to music, or drawing

Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code".

The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck.

I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?

For tools I want to have I don’t care. For hobby projects I’ll happily code. The want ebbs and flows.

At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out".

In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.

To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...

> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.

Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.

I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.

Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.

Having a business brain is the new moat.

[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry

A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character

> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money.

before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget