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You're making a good point. Competition is hard. It always has been. If vibe coding or vibe engineering wins, we'll all adopt it anyway.
I'm only asking this. If it seems you no longer need to write the code, and for some you don't even need to read it, what control do you really have over the software you're building? Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe it never did. Still, I'm wondering.
And if you lose control over how the software is made, where do you get the confidence you'll be able to fix it later when it breaks?
I think this is the real inner strength of devs. You know you can fix it anyway. You sleep well. You work in peace.
So with vibe coding, how do you build that confidence? I'm asking for real. It's not rhetorical.
That is a totally real point about confidence! I recently added a feature to an application that I know I won't be able to fix myself. If it breaks, I'll need to 100% rely on AI. On the other hand, I've inherited human written code in the past that I wished that I could just rewrite myself (so that I would confidently understood all of it) rather than try to understand how someone else's code was designed to work and then run into potential surprises. I never liked that part of the job, but maybe that will be the role of professional software developers of the future - less engineering from scratch (my favorite part) and more the dirty work of finding a specific point of failure in a mess of code that you didn't write.
My strategy, so far, has been to vibe small enough chunks that I feel like I at least own and understand the overall design/architecture and can pinpoint the general area that is failing/needs work. I am starting to feel like what I enjoy about software is the "owning" and controlling the direction of development part, not so much typing out lines of code and looking up syntax. But maybe I'm just getting old and lazy :)
But maybe I'm just getting old and lazy :)
😅
Maybe a little bit of a controversial take - I'm starting to think that the attitude toward vibe coding needs to change a little. Making a software product probably shouldn't be about making perfect and elegant code. I've spent most of my career as a software developer, and I love building and making things that I hope become products. BUT, if I'm serious about competing with other projects and products, I have to vibe code large chunks of code. And I do mean vibe. Sometimes there is just to much generated code to process every line manually. Sometimes, admittedly, the code isn't the most easy to follow, or even in a language that I'm fluent in. However, the competition is pumping out products that people are paying for today using these tools, so you simply can not do things tho old way and and be competitive. You'd need a whole team of developers and QA.. and it's simply just faster, cheaper and easier to do it with AI and fix whatever needs fixing later.
Don't get me wrong, though.. if you are writing anything critical, like banking software or a lightning app, I want it human approved/understood/written. But for the latest saas or mobile game, just vibe it until it works and then push to production... nobody cares how spaghetti it is or if you did something interesting behind the scenes. Developers already use frameworks and libraries that they didn't read the source to, this is just the next iteration of that.