Vibe coders or programmers

[u/Previous-Jury-4415]

I'm a beginner programmer and I'm worried about something in the future. After about four months of learning programming, development, and so on, I've seen many opinions from professionals and beginners alike. Some say that the demand for programming will steadily decrease due to artificial intelligence, and I don't know if this is true or not. I hope you can give me your opinions and advice. If you've had any experiences, please tell me before I regret it later.

[u/secretstonex]

You need to be a good programmer to vibe code. I've been using agentic genai tools for almost a year, and initially, I thought they were not so great, but I was taking some courses at the same time to learn all I can about GenAI and building agents.

I built a suite of agents and skills for the GenAI tool to write secure code, find issues, propose remediation, build threat models, architecture digrams, generate pen test plans, and execute offensive security testing with several mcps. All results and reports are verified and analysed by SMEs on our security team.

The app I built almost entirely using AI, is now an enterprise product, robust and scalable. Without human oversight, it would be a honeypot for bug bounty researchers. It's been through 3rd party pen testing and came out squeaky clean.

I turned the suite of security agents into it's own service and it is used by thousands of developers.

[u/Some_Breadfruit235]

Trust me. Companies are not doing well with AI.

It gets them their on-the-go tools much faster but it’s not scalable and nearly impossible to maintain.

Sooner or later companies will realize that they still need humans, and AI is just something we’re supposed to leverage rather replace us

[u/secretstonex → u/Some_Breadfruit235]

Companies that did not have a plan and that did not see the shortcomings are not doing well. Some are doing great because they new what they needed to do to cover the gaps and get the most out of GenAI.

[u/drakhan2002 → u/Some_Breadfruit235]

I don't trust you. Do you have empirical evidence to back your claim? Otherwise it's just an opinion.

[u/Some_Breadfruit235 → u/drakhan2002]

It was something that was talked about heavily when AI was first introduced. Many jobs did already get replaced by AI or atleast companies are trying to move that agenda.

It’s just not working out in their favor as they anticipated.

[u/NatMicky]

I'll be straight up with you. Being a programmer, learning to program, has nothing to do with whether there is AI or not. Programming is something a person is just drawn to and eats it up like an addiction.

That being said, for the foreseeable future there will be a demand for software engineers who can code, write software requirements, refactor code, optimize code, debug code, and write new code.

Learn data structures. Learn memory management allocation. Learn optimization. Learn to work with AI to produce pristine ready to go code. AI is a teammate who is more than happy to do the grunt work. Be blessed we don't have to do that anymore.

[u/Comfortable-Shop8080]

It is true. Good programmers (generally)know how to write good prompts. They can skip a lot of the redundant stuff.

Another thing, and here I speak for myself as a non developer who works in IT: I can now autonomously vibe code non complex scrips to do tasks for me. Previously I had to hire a programmer to do this. Granted I know my way around Python and how it fundamentally works, but this was simply not a thing in the past. In the future, you won’t even need to know almost anything about programming to vibe code. The AI will shit it out for you.

[u/HeurekaDabra]

Can only talk for my company and my GF company: we are hiring. After a couple of months of testing, the companies realized that having Claude as a co-worker increased the output of our devs a bit, but there are not enough devs to keep Claude busy.
We don't want vibe coders though. Especially with the product of my company since it's a critical software for our clients, we can't have people not 100% capable of understanding the code Claude produces.

Also AI is such new tech, who knows if it's viable down the line when the dust settles and prices are likely going through the roof once the venture capitalists want their money back...

[u/jimmykimnel]

My company take the philosophy of the Nvidia bloke which if I remember correctly was something like "ai won't take your job, the person who knows how to use ai will take your job".

It's there so use it if you can make it work for you, otherwise someone else will and leave you behind.  It doesn't mean just do ai for the sake of it, use it as a tool.

[u/ottawadeveloper]

On one hand, I think the tooling we call AI (which is still a bad name and I hope we come up with a better one) will help programmers. The predictive coding tool I have in my IDE does help me move faster, even if it's wrong 30% of the time.

But I don't think it'll ever replace programmers. And I don't think programming will become all prompts. It's still faster much of the time for me to just write the code by hand. Then again, I work in a field where there are few examples of code that does what I need it to do. I can see in areas where the code patterns are very common that it might be even more valuable. And it can automate some particularly dreadful tasks. Then again, a good programmer already knew how to automate those dreadful tasks lol.

One caveat to that is the world is a bit flooded with programmers. It was the career to have when I was growing up. And so a lot of people go into CS or learn programming to the point where the entry market is flooded with new grads. Meanwhile, between AI and offshoring, the job market for new software devs isn't amazing in North America unless you have a specialized skill that's more in demand. Skilled senior devs are still a commodity in demand. 

So I'm not sure it'll be an easy career path for anyone at this point, not like it used to be. Competition is fierce. 

If you want an easy career path, see if you can become a plumber or electrician. Those will never go out of style.

[u/itlogicpartnersllc]

don't make becoming a programmer your only goal build things pick projects slightly beyond your current ability and use ai as a tutor or coding assistant but make yourself understand every important piece that combination is much more valuable than vibe coding alone..

[u/JaleyHoelOsment]

some companies will do more with less, some companies with do less with more, and some companies will be doing more with more.

[u/LPatriot_]

I disagree. Many AI models these days aren't capable of creating big projects like trained humans can.

[u/secretstonex → u/LPatriot_]

If you approach it as an architect, do proper planning, design review, scoping, steering, and skills, most are fully capable, but you do need humans in the loop.