I think there's an element of truth to what you're saying in respect to the feelings of frustration that people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.
What I also think they are thinking (because I am one of them) is not that we can produce value easier and quicker. It's that there's a devaluing of education and expertise to the point where organisations will become wise to the fact that you're able to produce much more quickly because you're just relaying what they want to your prompt. And because you're doing it on their time, can just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas. (For personal projects and entrepreneurship this isn't applicable)
Let's take an example organisation with a team of 10 Devs. In the short term, they'll be able to build and provide value to the company and they will see the power that AI can bring. But with time they are now finding it harder to compete because everyone can build similar competitive services. So they try to reduce head count and those who control the purse are often not the devs so they reduce or remove the dev team because prompt engineering has gotten so good that they don't need your expertise anymore, they'll try it themselves.
So in the short term the organisation has all 10 devs producing a bunch of output. In the medium term, the company headcount can shrink because you no longer need to be aware of what is happening under the hood.
But because every business has this realisation, everyone will have the same ideas. So it will be harder to avoid being copied by competitors because ideas are no longer gate-kept by effort and expertise. SaaS will decline, in the medium to long term because you can vibe a replacement, in the long term the open models get good enough that the OpenAIs of the world aren't needed so the moat goes to the Nvidias of the world, then the hardware design can be automated/vibed, so the only moat is the land and raw materials. The manual labour will get flooded with knowledge worker refugees but that flood will probably force costs down there too.
In summary, I think they are mourning the feeling of being an expert and doing things others cannot, but I think more strongly they are looking at the "value" proposition and not seeing how it's sustainable.
I think both sides agree that building is much easier like you have articulated really well. I think they just take it a few steps further.
Any organization that vibecodes a significant amount of software in-house instead of buying it will not be reducing developer headcount. I'd bet on it.
The CTO or EngDir will not be able to run 10x10 agent-cli sessions, or review 50 vibe coded PRs per week, no matter how capably autonomous the agents become.
Sounds like a failure of imagination to me (I hope you're right). It doesn't have to be the CTO, it can be anyone who will sit there for the cheapest cost to read output while assuming the risk of it all working until they retire. Sounds glorious
> assuming the risk of it all
scapegoating isn't really legally viable. corps who outsource their development haven't outsourced their liability.
Sorry I meant ownership of it working when an alert goes off in production and having to fix it, not legal liability. I should have been more clear.
Even if all the changes are “good” not shoddy, awareness of changes will still require layers of cognitive filtering. One human PM clerk will not be able to oversee all of the products, one developer will not be able to oversee all changes in all codebases.
Well obviously the real solution is for the owner of the company to
1. Fire everyone else
2. prompt the AI "make me more money than you cost" (that's a short prompt, innit?)
3. Retire to Aruba
Right, in 5 years time the economy will be entirely vibecoded by pension fund and family office bankers. No one will be employed at all
> people who are non-technical can compete with those who have spent decades of time and effort to learning the crafts of their trade.
I say this often, but in 25 years I have not worked with non-technical people who can design a complete, logical product, even with AI/LLMs "unlocking" the coding part now. Maybe I'm just unlucky but quite a few companies and different domains.
The non-technical people can learn (or can be forced to learn to keep their jobs) and enough will succeed to devastate programmer employment.
> just copy your processes, get rid of you because they have their own ideas
Implies a process requiring no expert knowledge or understanding. That doesn't seem to match common experience of professional agentic development.
You are describing vibe coding, which is without human design, review or direction.
Models are getting better at this, but it's not yet clear how practical they will be. They often fail on uncommon tasks, or get increasingly more expensive as the code-base grows.
I think things will change, as the technology develops; problem is corps are acting like we are already there, encouraged by ai-providers.
I'm optimistic about ai, pessimistic about the fallout of ai hype.
I agree with you, it's the same experience I've had. But I've seen completely nontechnical people build some sites and become convinced themselves, and if those people control the purse then it doesn't matter as much what devs think the reality of agentic dev is. (Until they get burned enough times).
What if engineers push out all non-engineer CXOs precisely because of what you are saying. Hypothetically, if you replace all employees with engineers (so all the non-engineering roles) and allow them to optimize processes using LLMs, isn’t this like lean/six sigma on crack?
Yep, that could happen as well. I suspect some engineers would be surprised how much work, time and effort it takes to build the relationships to market and sell to (along with all the other roles).
I hope that everyone agrees to collectively recognise we all need to still do some things together and the knowledge in our heads is still much more important.