This is how I feel about vibe coding.

Frontier models can easily one shot what I ask for, and make adjustments as ask to quickly make an app that meets what I wanted.

But often when I programmed outside of work (and at work too) I learnt something.

Quite often that my favourite pattern is an antipattern in some use cases.

That might never happen again at the rate of development.

The parallel is real, but in math the "cash value" of the results often won't appear for years, if at all, and so the teaching and "intellectual fortification" is the primary point of the whole enterprise (at least, a major part of it).

In contrast, the value of a program is typically just the "black box" service it provides. Indeed, the program itself has always been opaque to most business stakeholders. Before, they paid human programmers and got back a program they didn't understand but could use; now, they pay an LLM provider and get back a program they don't understand but can use. In the pre-LLM era, the economic value of "understanding" and "shared knowledge" about the programs themselves was only that it made maintenance and changes cheaper. It never had intrinsic value, except as intellectual satisfaction to programmers (I was... am... one of those who found that value).

I disagree. Humans still learn to read despite other humans reading at an objectively higher level since the beginning of writing.

Learning is not an output-efficient process but is a fantastic outcome. AI lowers some portions of the development workflow but not yet every part, and, efficiently produced outputs aren't always the major outcome desired. In the real world / outside the benchmark lab, you care about robustness, reusability, composability, security, and more. Targeting speed to acceptable average output inferred from a prompt or similar benchmark metrics miss a big part of the game.

That's definitely true, but on the other hand I can produce with a month of literal non-stop vibe coding (agents running overnight, with checklists of what to qa for when I'm up) what took years for others to do, working in teams of tens or hundreds. At that scale, it's not a question of "doing it faster and not learning" or "doing it slowly"; the alternative is it not happening at all.

I am sure even before vibe coding you used to use plenty of libraries that were open source and had no idea how the implementation was.