AI wrote my code!
Claiming that “all my code is now written by an agent” is ambiguous. It includes:
- Folks who know what they are doing and care about software design, who can now produce code much faster.
- Vibe coders who treat the agent as a black box that generates a working system.
I validate daily that, with the current models, vibe coding is not suitable for building minimally maintainable systems. Agents introduce major internal quality issues quickly and spread them even faster because they echo existing patterns so well.
I see two challenges for programmers today:
First, learning how to do (1) properly: how to create the right context for agents, how to orchestrate them and manage their memory, how to remove toil, parallelize work, etc. In other words: maximize the value we can extract from this new sorcery.
Second, vibe coding is fantastic for non-programmers to create value by doing things they could not do before: quickly iterating on ideas, automating workflows, building ad-hoc tools, and so on. The key question is: where internal software quality starts to matter, and how to enforce it without diminishing this new source of value.
I am also increasingly convinced that many companies blindly embracing vibe coding and chasing futuristic PR headlines are about to discover the terrors of technical debt at scale.