If you’re anywhere near X/Twitter in 2025, particularly following tech indiepreneurs, vibe and coding are words that just keep popping up. Vibe coding, vibe coded, one-shotted.

At some point I really couldn’t stand it anymore and had to mute it.

There I've done it 🤯 Lets see if it calms down... pic.twitter.com/vsX6S5TGNS

— Ricardo Marques (@RCM7) March 18, 2025

Almost reminds me when I stopped watching the news during Covid lockdowns. What was the point? Everything sounded the same. It was just noise.

Probably I’m in a pretty noisy bubble, but still— people need to calm down.

AI is changing the world; software engineers will not disappear

Both can be true at the same time.

I can be skeptical, and particularly in my area of expertise, while I’m always excited to learn new things, I also take my time to analyze the impact they can have: good and bad. And I’ve been skeptical about the use of LLM’s at large scale, but there’s no doubt: AI is changing the world!

Software engineers have been changing the world since computers came about. More particularly, since internet started becoming widely available. Including in our pockets. More and more mundane tasks can be done by computers. Or robots that are computers. Or robots that are controlled by computers. Or by people that are found, hired, paid, reviewed, and scheduled again, all via a computer. We’ve been optimizing our daily inefficiencies for decades.

The tech industry as a whole has been also continuously improving hardware speed, frameworks, libraries and all the layers between the developers and their end product. Everything keeps getting cheaper and faster. People can do more with less every time. AI is no different. It’s just another tool that helps us do task A in 0.X the time it usually takes.

It’s true we could argue that this is different, that LLM’s are just another level that we’ve never seen before. And I’m sure it is, but to think that it’s going to replace us all by the end of the year is incredibly naive. Great headline though.

Like every new technology, resources available and human adoption speed will be the bottlenecks. There’s still over 2.5 billion people with no internet access, 12.1 trillion sheets of paper used in US offices per year, and people think AI will be writing all lines of code?

Imagine critical infrastructure, aviation, and trips to Mars being written solely by AI and just a few people vibe coding all day to make it happen.

The reality

Like with that friend that is so confident and always has quick answers to everything, keep your senses sharp. AI is amazing. I use it everyday for all sorts of things. It often replaces search when I’m looking for quick on-the-go answers. Parsing documents. Coding. But I seriously need to keep it in check.

When I spend a couple of days mostly coding using an AI agent, I notice I think less. I create new things quickly. And then get stuck when there’s an issue because I don’t understand them. Then I go read the documentation, understand the problem, and fix the issue with a tenth of the frustration, at least compared to actively fighting with the agent.

I’ve also noticed that I actually still enjoy the technical aspects of my work. Getting stuff done faster is nice, but if I didn’t have to think at all, and all I did was write prompts, then I have little satisfaction. This does not happen with the tasks I consider boring and time consuming though. And it’s perhaps for those tasks that I’m most inclined to use the little helper.

From another perspective, there seems to be a growing trend of people with no coding experience releasing entire projects, fully built by AI. Some of them are quite successful, at least for now. Is that a wrong thing? No. Will reality catch up with them? Most likely. Some might make a fortune first and be okay with it. That’s fair. But I’m certain that in these cases, the projects that get traction will inevitably face issues that would be completely avoidable if the person writing the prompts understood the results.

You can also argue that that is a small price to pay to test products quickly and cheaply. That’s absolutely true. It’s also kind of amazing that that is even possible. It’s like building a house, or a plane without knowing anything about construction or aviation mechanics. It’s almost like being rich. You just say something to someone, and things happen. But we all know that we’re not there yet, and that however good LLM’s are today, we still need expert engineers to build things that scale reliably.

Your job will not be replaced if you keep knowing how to think.