Before AI, there were also stories of people who had no background in software engineering who wrote entire applications using their fingers. This was called "learning to be a software engineer".

I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.

Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language. We're going to see an explosion in the number of people writing software as clever people who invested their time in something other than learning to program are now able to write software for themselves.

This may be true, but define an entire application. Is it a CRUD app? Is it an app that scales to a thousand, ten thousand, a million users? Is it an app that is bug free and if not bug free, easy to fix said bugs with few to no regressions? Is it an app that is easy to maintain and add new features to without risk of breaking other stuff?

I think it is genuinely impressive to be able to build one app with AI. But I haven't seen evidence that someone could build a maintanable, scalable app with ai. In fact, anecdotally, a friend of mine who runs an agency had a client who vibe coded their app, figured out that they couldn't maintain it, and had him rewrite the app in a way that could be maintained long term.

Again, I'm not an Ai detractor. I use it every day at work. But I've needed to harden my app and rules and such, such that the AI cannot make mistakes when I or another engineer is vibing a new feature. It's a work in progress.

What is not true, that "so many software engineers are having an identity crisis"?

I don't believe they said that folks new to AI can't make impressive use of it. They did however say that senior folks with lots of scrappy and holistic knowledge can do amazing things with it. Both can be true.

I've seen people generate a lot of vibeslop with AI, but they didn't actually "Write entire applications using AI".

They still have absolutely no clue how it works, so how could they "write entire applications"? They vibed it, but they certainly didn't write any of it, not one bit of it, and they're clueless as to how to extend it, upgrade it, and maintain it so that the AI doesn't make it a bloated monstrosity of AI patches and fixes and workarounds that they simply could never begin to understand.

They were also following a dozen youtube tutorials step by step, so even that part was someone else doing the thinking.

Yeah, these are the same guys constantly bugging me to help them figure something out.

Its silly to say this but one such person is „pewdiepie”