I think there were similar upsets in mathematics when the calculator and graphing calculator became the norm. For English, I imagine everything from typewriters to automatic grammar tools have felt revolutionary compared to what was important in the past.
> vibing seems to be the norm
I know enough coding that "vibe coding" wasn't something I ever tried/spent time doing.
However, a friend recently stayed in my guest room and used the TV in my office as a monitor. He had time to kill between jobs/housing and using only free AI, he learned how to use Godot enough to get a grip on how the various elements worked and built a working game that would have passed as high-end shareware in the late 1990s.
I was shocked. The guy had nothing but an idea and no prior experience AT ALL in coding or graphics, he just had played a ton of games and had a detailed idea of what he wanted. Copilot ran him in circles now and then, but like any troubleshooting, he found a way to make it work (often copy/pasting between AIs to get one AI's bad code fixed by another).
I could never trust a codebase without reviewing it, but he didn't care. He just made it work.
And what was created in a week by a total newbie would have taken me a month or more if I'd tried to do it by hand. My decades of experience & tricks of the trade do not hold a candle to what AI can accomplish.
Time is the most valuable resource we must manage as humans. So what choice am I making if I keep on the slow/hand-made path?
Sure, you can vibe code an MVP. But then let’s limit it at that.
I felt this way until I saw a person who had never seen an if/else or loop or variables ... program a game from nothing, including graphics, in the time most hand coders would take to get a plan together. And the game/gameplay/interface was their idea, they just didn't write the code.
I asked many times "what if something breaks and you don't know how to fix it because you never understood the code" and that did happen, but instead of hitting a roadblock they found their way through it by prompting AI.
I hear where you are coming from, but I don't think many people will choose the harder/more involved way when there's an easy way.
There were many people who struggled to go from punch cards to modern programming on a terminal screen. I think we'll find our way through this, but not using the new technology is probably not the outcome.
This is a very interesting point. I suspect AI will indirectly hinder progress more as time goes on. Doing something new will not be worth this additional cost.
