Oof, too close to home. To this day I refuse to type normally on a phone and insist on swipe typing. But I am already extremely sick of it… and of typing on phones. Not like we got any actual competition on smartphones, mind you, but I would have long ago went there if we did.

I have several successes with LLMs enabling and boosting me and yes that requires you to be a pedantic sonovabeech. I don’t mind though. I made very good money a while ago by being pedantic, and I keep winning in many situations by being so as well.

Us the good programmers, in this “AI” era, have only two things to do to not only remain relevant but to also start commanding even higher payments several years down the road:

1. Don’t give in to the temptation to outsource thinking to the really good models (DeepSeek, GeminiPro, Qwen3). Only use it as an educator, generator of boilerplate that will not make you a better programmer if you spend 3 hours typing it out painstakingly, and a discussion partner (tradeoffs, common wisdom and the like).
2. Not die. That’s right: “AI” makes the really good programmers even better, and the bad ones – even worse. We’ll win by merely staying alive.

Everybody is celebrating the death of programmers, but what I am seeing is that there will be need for them even more in a couple of years when the world wakes up from its sweet dreamy slumber and discovers how many “vibe coded” apps are in super crucial positions in society and even power.

And let’s not even mention EU’s re-militarization and their desire to stop being dependent on US infrastructure. How many jobs for highly qualified professionals will that create?

The future is looking pretty sweet for us.

My 2 cents: I think there’s something to this vibe-coding There are many levels what people mean by it. And each level has its own probability of success.

Many folks understand vibe coding as - “I don’t need to know anything about programming and I’ll just one-shot my project with a single prompt”. Success probability? Roughly the same as hitting production on your first mix phx.new. Even if you use something mainstream for vibe-coding, like nodejs.

Then there is - “I don’t need to know anything about programming and I’ll just iterate with AI till I get it right”. This one is interesting. I think AI is capable to achieve something to test the idea.

Will it scale? No.
Will it be maintainable? Also no.
Will it impress investors if the idea is hot? Absolutely.

If your idea proves itself, you’ll either have investments or money to hire devs to build something decent and maintainable.
I don’t know much about the market of building MVPs, I imagine it involves outsourcing to countries with cheaper labor. But it’s still not cheap, especially if as a founder, you are investing your own money. Now you can do it yourself. That’s a serious shift for MVP economics. I imagine this will absolutely disrupt the MVP-for-hire industry.

And then there are people who: “I do know programming, and want to build something either for work or for myself”. I fall in this category.

At work I use AI for couple of things:

1. Help write documentation: code, tickets, internal documents.
2. Help write boilerplate code that is easily repeatable, based on some other parts of the existing code.
3. Build a throw-away prototype to demonstrate the concept.

All works pretty well.

And for my own projects I’ll add some more things:

1. Write HEEX markup with Tailwind. I can do it myself, but it will take me longer. Plus it’s a bit boring task for me. Claude does this exceptionally well and it’s super fast. The other day I asked it to fix dark mode. Worked after first try.
2. Generate assets like icons, logos, photos. It’s amazing how much money this saves. It’s basically free now. Used to cost me $$$ or my soul to stock photo sites, or beg my designer friends to help me.
3. Use AI to build an almost full featured demo. Just the frontend part of it, in order to understand myself better how it will behave. Before I needed to build it fully to only get disappointed that I don’t like it. Now I vibe with a fake frontend on v0.dev or lovable, click around, change my mind guilt-free.

I think that if you are in this camp - AI will only make you faster and better. You still need to code the parts that are important and interesting, boring repetitive parts will not slow you down, and on top of it - you will get extra things for free, like designs and validating a concept.

I mostly wish that that the term “vibe coding” would die—in my ~35 years of using a computer it’s the cringiest term I’ve ever heard. I’m probably just old, though. But like, I can’t be that old because I used “cringiest”… right? But it really gives me a visceral reaction every time I hear it and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

To add to what’s been said, I’m honestly not sure that inheriting a “vibe coded” codebase is going to be any worse than inheriting a prototype-turned-production application from a tech savvy entrepreneur whose sole focus was to ship Ship SHIP. So I’m not too worried about this.

I still haven’t used an agent and only just started using Copilot a few weeks ago (lol?) It’s been very good and sometimes a little bad. A lot of what @egze says resonates which are the times it’s good: it’s written 20-line handle_events with just a few chars input and just 10 mins ago it inferred a Calendar date format for me which was just the bees knees. The times it’s bad have been what @D4no0 touched on… in just a couple of weeks I’ve gotten lazy and just hit “accept” for a problem I didn’t quite understand (because it was there) only to later realize it wrote a 15 line function that could have been 3. I’m already working on training myself out of that. I’ve gone back and forth between auto-suggest v needing to manually request suggestions.

I’ve also had the experience of writing a simple algorithm-y function and asked if it could improve it and it couldn’t so I felt good, lol. I then asked it to improve a slightly more complex one and it choked. Among other similar things it said: “I removed the Enum.reverses because it doesn’t seem like they are needed, but if they are just put them back” which is pretty funny (they were most certainly needed).

EDIT: It also often writes tests pretty much exactly as I would have written them (which is just great).