Vibe Coding Is the Past and It Needs to Be Removed from the Vocabulary

I will speak directly and unambiguously, and someone may not like this. That is your right, just as it is mine to express my thought here.

I respect all professions. Even those that remained in the past, like a driver of horse-drawn carriages.

If a couple of years ago vibe coding meant something funny, where programmers and ordinary mortals used AI to write some blocks of code, today anyone who works closely with Codex/Claude knows that the professionalism of these systems in writing code is much better than a human's, regardless of your experience and level of intelligence. AI is still better. This is not an opinion, it is a fact.

Now about the market.

The market has problems and needs that will always have to be solved.

This is the function.

The market also has current means for solving this function.

This is the tool.

Function ≠ Tool

A business performs the function: it closes market tasks and pains. It uses the most optimal tools available at the current moment, and this gives it a competitive advantage and earnings.

Writing code is a tool, not a function. Code itself has no value.

The market and business do not care how the code appeared. They care about the result of the function.

Designing and debugging systems that give such a result is the task for a developer, programmer, engineer, vibe coder… (it does not matter) who will do it quickly, with quality, and preferably inexpensively.

If you or your employees do not vibe code, you will lose the business race. Your chances also move closer to zero with every new update of another AI model.

It turns out that today any person who develops digital solutions is a vibe coder. Then why do we need this term from the past?

It is just as strange as if carriage drivers were proud of their title and did not want to become drivers, claiming that to move from point A to point B you need to hit the hood of a car with a whip and put hay into the fuel tank.

A vibe coder is like a vibe carriage driver when we are talking about the driver of a car. It sounds ridiculous, right?

Calling a person a vibe coder is like calling a driver self-taught, claiming that they must learn to operate transport specifically in a driving school and not on the road.

There are no more vibe coders. There are only system developers with different levels, profiles, and experience.

Someone who has written software for a long time has more systematic thinking and understanding of architecture, but also cognitive habits that for years directed their thinking along the path of writing code by hand. The new generation of developers will not have those habits.

Any developer today can concentrate on the complex solution of problems and the creation of genuinely complex and unusual systems, delegating the writing of code to AI. Take on more ambitious challenges, close real pains, perform the function, deliver the result.

At OpenAI and Anthropic, older GPT and Claude models are engaged in system design, dataset preparation, and training of new models, not people. Surprised? Listen to the latest podcasts from Sam or Dario.

People design, discuss, and set goals. People define the vision, put values into it, and observe the process. People know where a system is strong, where it has weak places, and intervene where it is needed.

Looking at the variety of jobs in IT, I wondered what I would call myself. And for some reason this immediately came to mind:

Architect of autonomous AI systems

It sounds pompous, but damn, this is exactly what I do for 9-10 hours a day.