Vibe Coding: The Death of a Craft
I've been coding professionally for 30+ years. I've built products, shipped code, invented algorithms, debugged my way through nights with nothing but compiler errors and coffee—and along the way, I've written books about it. For most of my career, coding felt like a craft. You shaped logic with your bare hands, line by line. You sweated through the details.
That world is gone.
In 2025, coding as a craft is dead.
We now have AI coding assistants like Claude, Gemini, Cursor, and ChatGPT. And let's be honest: they don't "help you code." They do the coding. Your role is to vibe-code—describe intentions, push the system with prompts, and iterate until the machine spits out something you can use.
It's like we went from carpenters with chisels to people pointing at furniture catalogs while robots do the assembly.
Students, I Don't Envy You
CS students today are stuck in limbo. They're still being drilled on data structures and sorting algorithms—skills they may never use. When they graduate, they won't be writing bubble sort; they'll be babysitting black boxes, orchestrating AI agents, and debugging code they didn't even type.
It's like training pilots to master every dial in a cockpit, then shoving them into an autonomous plane where their job is to sit and wait for something to go wrong.
No wonder they're confused.
Yes, the Craft Is Dead
Manual coding is no longer the point. Nobody's getting hired in 2025 because they can hand-roll a linked list.
But the meta-craft—the part that matters—is alive. Problem framing. Architectural decisions. Trade-offs. Knowing when the AI is confidently wrong.
If you grew up writing code by hand, that's a tough pill to swallow. But the truth is clear: in the age of vibe coding, syntax is irrelevant. Intent is everything.
The New Reality
Coders aren't coders anymore—we're drivers of code-producing AI agents. The job is:
- Tell the system what to build.
- Know when it built the wrong thing.
- Glue it together with other pieces.
- Own the outcome.
And quite honestly, writing the code has always been the difficult and tedious part—the part you hire for. The real job of a Computer Scientist, in my opinion, is not to write code—it's to solve problems with code.
We don't build with code—we build with judgment.
Final Thought
So yes, coding as a craft is dead. But building? Building is very much alive.
Photo credit: MIT Technology Review
If you love the act of coding itself, you'll become a niche artisan—like the guy who still hand-planes wood in a CNC factory world. But if you love creating systems that solve real problems, you're about to have superpowers.
The question is whether we'll embrace the new role—or spend the next decade mourning a craft that isn't coming back.
At least it took me thirty years to watch my career go obsolete. For some of you, the clock is already ticking.
I watched the same shift happen in music when I built a composing partner over a weekend.
My coding craft started in 1997 with Visual Basic CGI scripts. That world ended quietly.
Three decades of accumulated competence reconfigured in less than a year — and time is the only thing that compounds.
📬 Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe for the stuff that doesn't make it onto the blog — half-finished ideas, what I'm reading and listening to, behind-the-scenes notes, and the occasional rabbit hole. No spam, just things worth your time.