> The job has changed from a craft to operating an unreliable machine.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
> Try asking a non-developer in your life what their dream software would be for their work, or their hobby. If they don't have what Nilay Patel calls "software brain" I'd be surprised if they came up with something actionable.
I've posted this in numerous comments because I think it bears repeating: there are tech-savvy non-developers who are actually building and shipping stuff with AI. I personally know a few who have been successful in acquiring initial customers.
You can say "but their apps won't scale", "their apps aren't secure", etc. and you might be right but these criticisms ignore the fact that most human-built software suffers from issues around scalability, security, etc. What AI in the hands of a relatively tech-savvy person is capable of is building functional, usable applications that are pretty decent compared to what you might get if you paid an experienced contractor tens of thousands of dollars to build.
A whole generation of young people has grown up with the internet, smartphones, etc. They might not be trained software engineers or have a "software brain" but in many cases they probably have a better intuitive sense for digital product design than a 30 or 40-something engineer who has been staring at an IDE for the past decade(s).
> there are tech-savvy non-developers who are actually building and shipping stuff with AI. I personally know a few who have been successful in acquiring initial customers.
It'll shake your world, but tech-savvy non-developers were building and shipping long before AI.
> they probably have a better intuitive sense for digital product design than a 30 or 40-something engineer who has been staring at an IDE for the past decade(s).
Because developers only stare at IDE 24/7, and never interact with anyone besides mother who brings tendies to their basement? What am I even reading?
> It'll shake your world, but tech-savvy non-developers were building and shipping long before AI.
They weren't building and shipping by themselves though. They were hiring people to do the work.
AI has made it possible for people with motivation and time to do what was previously only possible with motivation, time and money.
> Because developers only stare at IDE 24/7, and never interact with anyone besides mother who brings tendies to their basement? What am I even reading?
Why is so hard to acknowledge the fact that many of the people who are good at developing aren't as good at coming up with ideas for digital products and building businesses on them?
> there are tech-savvy non-developers who are actually building and shipping stuff with AI
I absolutely believe that. I think those are people with "software brain" who are on their way to becoming real developers.
By the point they can write apps that are secure and scale... they'll have learned enough about software development to be employable as software developers. They'll be part of a new breed of developer who never memorized the syntax of a programming language, but they'll still be at the starting point of learning a HUGE volume of other stuff that's necessary to build good software.
If we want to stay employed, we need to be notably better at building software than they are.
I agree, and I want to add that 'better' doesn't necessarily mean 'creates more robust, elegant, resilient software'. Better means from a business perspective. If we (I'm one of the people you're discussing) end up cheaper or more fungible, for example, we still might be worth hiring from a business perspective even if the code we create is shit.
I've also seen an assumption that you've made here that I think is worth drawing attention to and questioning: that the tech-savvy non-developers are starting from zero or near zero when it comes to programming and software development. Right now, that's probably mostly true, but I'm not sure that will continue to be the case. I'm not a developer (depending on how fuzzy we want the boundaries around the idea to be, anyway). I do understand the building blocks of programming languages (e.g. I can answer all the questions fragmede posed in a sister comment), the trade-offs between rolling your own and using existing libraries, the need to evaluate tools, frameworks, and languages to determine which is best for your use case, why version control matters, why access rights matter, why backups and a test environment are necessary, why it matters to write code another human can read, etc.
Do I understand as much as an active working developer? Absolutely not and I'd never claim to, but I'm far from starting at zero.
The reason for this is that I was raised by programmers. There are far, far more programmers and general tech nerds now than there were in 1988 (when I was born). Which means that in 10-20 years, there are going to be a lot more children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and so on of developers, and a lot of them are not going to be starting at zero. For pretty much of all computing history, there's been a substantial opportunity cost to developing a deep understanding of coding and software development: either a person has to be so into the domain that they devote a lot of their waking hours to it (usually in adolescence or young adulthood, when that trade off closes the most doors and makes developing certain other time intensive skills difficult), or they have to obtain a CS degree, which means not getting a different kind of degree and often incurring significant front-loaded financial costs. The opportunity cost for people born into programming or tech families is much lower. You can start younger and spread out the hours needed to learn across a greater amount of years, you can acquire knowledge in less time-intensive ways and while practicing other skills (e.g. my cousins also have 'software brain' and we could all hang out and develop those skills while also developing in person social skills), and you have a built in network of experienced people who want to help you + that can give you extremely individualized, personalized attention.
If what you suggest comes to pass, I think that one of the greatest threats to SDE as a career is going to be your own children and grandchildren.
This is a great comment, thanks for giving me a bunch to think about here.
I'm personally excited about people with deep specialities in other fields being able to build software without reskilling as software engineers first.
Nevermind syntax, what's a variable? function? class? What's the difference between int/float/boolean string? Nevermind more advanced concepts like O(1) vs O(n). But when the vibe coder just needs to prompt "the page loads really slowly. plz fix" and the LLM can go in, add an index to the right SQL table, add a limit and pagination, so what if I can tell you the difference between PostgreSQL's dialect of SQL vs MySQL, and what the difference is in row types supported. I can describe what happens when you type Google.com into your webbrowser to an inane level of detail off the top of my head, but when the LLM can do an even more through version, I mean, I can pat myself on the back and be smug that I know most of that innately, but what is it really worth?
About a decade back, we, as an industry were collectively learning how to make apps webscale, and oh the blog posts about not using a database as a queue. But the LLMs have ingested all of them. I've only read the ones I came across, and of course my professional experience being part of teams implementing that at various companies. So I've got that going for me, but when the Vibe-platform-dev just has to tell the LLM "hey, when the user hits the send message button, it's slow. /goal make messages fast", and the LLM grinds for hours overnight switching the entire system over to a pub sub event driven architecture and the vibe-platform-dev doesn't even know what pubsub stands for or that they're using one unless they go back and read the transcript. I don't think there's as much of a domain expertise moat for as long as we're hoping.
It only takes two or three unreviewed prompts like "the page loads slow, plz fix" for you to end up with a tangled mess that even the agents can't productively work with.
Take a look at the Reddit forums for vibe-coders - now that a bunch of them have been hacking on things for 3+ months there's a growing awareness there that you hit a wall. Here's the first post I found from just searching "reddit vibe coding wall", it's a great illustration of the genre: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1sabdw3/anyone_...
Software development is really, really hard. Coding agents can get you a surprisingly long way, but if you want to build real software for real people you quickly find that you DO need that domain expertise.
The agents may type all of the code for you now, but you need a huge amount of skill to clearly tell them what to do, confidently decide what to do next and credibly present software that works for other people to use.
Offtopic, but how do you monitor all of this stuff, Simon? Do you have a routine where you recheck Reddit, Twitter, HN, other resources, or do you use LLMs to find material for you?
I spend way too much time on Hacker News, Bluesky and Twitter and occasionally check in on Reddit (I'm more of a lurker than a poster there.)
I don't have any automated LLM scanners, but I do frequently have ChatGPT run searches for me with questions like "Find the most credible accounts of the recent Oracle layoffs, how they went, rationale, problems caused".
For now. But in a future where the non-technical vibecoder + AI can fix the slow site without the benefit of my expertise to thoroughly prompt it properly, why hire me?
The business goal is that the site is slow. That gets fixed by the non-technical vibecoder for the cost of however many tokens. Why look for outside help (aka me) if there's no need to and the AI can do it all?
> I absolutely believe that. I think those are people with "software brain" who are on their way to becoming real developers.
In my opinion, this is a software developer-centric way of thinking that reminds me of the saying, "if all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail."
Here's an alternative perspective:
For billions of people, technology products are an integral part of daily life. As a result, lots of people have an interest in building technology products, particularly software. Thanks to AI, you no longer need to be a "real developer" to build software. You can learn enough to build things that are commercially viable without seeking to be employed as a developer.
> If we want to stay employed, we need to be notably better at building software than they are.
While I don't believe that the market for developers will shrink to 0, unfortunately, I think this type of comment reflects the fear, existential angst and denial that has overtaken many people in this industry.
The reality is that developers are no different than all the displaced workers who came before them. One day you had a job that seemed secure and capable of providing for a comfortable life and the next you were facing the prospect of diminished wages and unemployment because the world simply needs fewer people with your skills and there's no way around the secular trend.
The sad irony is that when software was eating the world and new CompSci grads could take their pick of $150,000+ job offers before ever writing a line of production code, a lot of people in the industry had a smug "tough luck" attitude towards all the workers being displaced by the tech boom. Now it's their turn.
> The sad irony is that when software was eating the world and new CompSci grads could take their pick of $150,000+ job offers before ever writing a line of production code, a lot of people in the industry had a smug "tough luck" attitude towards all the workers being displaced by the tech boom. Now it's their turn.
You could've just written this sentence and dropped the rest. I understand your vindictive, "justice", self-hate line of thought, but not it's not a healthy way to live. Get help.
Maybe the tools are going to get to a point where this isn't true but today even with Claude Code at whatever at hand you're going to have to learn enough about software to basically be a developer in the traditional sense to deliver a multi-tenant application that has to deal with high TPS or whatever. At least at present you're positing there's no need for carpenters because the home gamer can knock together a table or birdhouse at home.
> ...to deliver a multi-tenant application that has to deal with high TPS or whatever.
There's a whole world of opportunity that lives below complex multi-tenant applications that have to deal with high TPS.
> At least at present you're positing there's no need for carpenters because the home gamer can knock together a table or birdhouse at home.
This is an extreme, straw man argument. And here's the thing: I don't know a home gamer who framed a house. But I do know tech-savvy people who have used AI to build web apps that they have launched and been able to get customers to pay for.
Not every tech-savvy person has the ability to do this but the whole "you can't do that if you're not a software developer" argument looks to me like a denial mechanism more than a reflection of reality. People are doing it because the AI tools have advanced to the point where they can.
With all due respect, this sounds like just another version of the arrogant, scared attitude that seems to be more and more prevalent among software folks these days.
Is it really hard to imagine that there are tech-savvy people who are smart and motivated but don't have training as software developers, who are now capable of using AI to build and ship things?
In other words, AI doesn't allow any "any idiot" to build commercially useful software. What it does is allow smart people who aren't software developers and who don't want to become software developers professionally to, with a much shorter learning curve and on a much faster time scale, take their ideas and build and ship functional software.
It just feels like I’m trying to nail spaghetti to the wall talking to you because you can’t make up your mind what your argument is. Either it still requires learning and skill to do it —- in which case these are self-taught software developers, which is not a new phenomenon —- or it’s so easy now that the work is completely deskilled, in which case we shouldn’t expect anyone to be able to charge for their work for very long once everyone realizes.
It seems to me you're more interested in semantics than the substance of the discussion. Why not consider the possibility that AI is creating something new?
I would argue that the non-developers who are able to use AI to build, ship and sell software aren't "self-taught software developers". The biggest reason is that they're effectively not learning how to code in any meaningful way. They don't need to. AI is getting "so good" that they can prompt their way to functional software without the same level of knowledge and skill that was required previously to do the same.
We can discuss the limits and risks of this, and you can criticize AI's output, but the reality is that people are actually doing this and having some success. First hand, I've seen a former colleague who is a skilled digital marketer with no development experience launch a web app for a niche market and sell it to a number of customers.
I don't understand why you're so interested in extremes (your skilled versus deskilled hyperbole). Is it really so hard to contemplate that AI is disrupting the market for software development? It's not that it has eliminated the need for intelligence and skill; it's that it is allowing a larger number of people to do something that previously required a different set of skills that was much more difficult and time-consuming to acquire.
To use Silicon Valley speak, AI is democratizing software development. That doesn't mean every idiot can build and deploy a functioning web application; it does mean that a growing number of intelligent, motivated non-developers can.
I bought a book however many years ago with no previous development experience and delivered a Web app people paid for and eventually honed that as an actual career, so I’m just not really seeing what’s a difference in kind here. I also disagree with the “democratization” frame because now developers are spending like $1000 per month on tokens at their jobs, which does the opposite of making things more accessible.
Another angle to refute this take: my experience is software developers themselves arent good at building software products. Its been historically necessary but not sufficient to have to understand the underlying tech. Even if AI makes that no longer necessary, it doesn’t magically make people good at building useful and usable things.
Being in the weeds of the trade expands the lens of capabilities so I’d give the upper hand to someone more deeply aware of the tech vs not. even though that in itself is still not sufficient.
> I've posted this in numerous comments because I think it bears repeating: there are tech-savvy non-developers who are actually building and shipping stuff with AI. I personally know a few who have been successful in acquiring initial customers.
I mean, sure. But there have always been people teaching themselves to program too. In the end it's a pretty small population.
> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!
This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.
Also, even if the premise behind the SaaSpocalypse is naive and oversimplified (companies aren't going to replace all their SaaSes with internally vibe-coded replacements), it looks reasonable that net-net AI will have a negative impact on the value of software.
> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.
That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.
It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing.
> ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of 2025. Even putting aside the fact that (from what I understand) over half of Anthropic and OpenAI's employees are in non-engineering roles, if you assumed every employee was an engineer, Anthropic and OpenAI could triple their staffing levels and it still wouldn't even fill a quarter of the void.
Yes that’s the right source. There would be no recovery in SWE market after the higher interest rates killed it if LLMs had any major impact on SWE employability.
Airbnb should invest in Shift, continue to encourage exorbitant cleaning fees, and subsidize discounts for hosts so that they're incentivized to fire their current housekeeping providers and switch to Shift.
> And we’re saddened that the new process results in lower quality work, and that a lot of people just don’t seem to care.
1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case. There was a lot of mediocrity and worse.
2. I'm not sure the work is "lower quality" depending on how you define "quality". AI might result in an uncomfortable uniformity but at the same time, a lot of AI work product is pretty darn usable because the models have been trained against conventions that, love them or hate them, "work" for the vast majority of end users.
>1. Arguments like this seem to be based on the idea that, prior to AI, most of this type of work was being done by skilled artisans dedicated to quality work product. As I think anyone who actually worked in the industry and is being honest knows, this wasn't the case.
I think this is more of "another brick in the wall." There was already a LOT of pressure to do the bare minimum to fulfill requirements and then declare success. Now, those pressures seem insurmountable.
If your requirements are reasonable and serve the needs of end users and the business, doing "the bare minimum" isn't such a bad thing. "I just remove everything that is not David."
Of course, the requirements aren't always right, but in my experience, engineers/developers are just as capable as business owners of defining requirements poorly.
> If your requirements are reasonable and serve the needs of end users and the business
Have you ever heard of the idea of malicious compliance? doing exactly what is required, and no more, is the path to ruin for all of us. Requirements will never work this way.
I believe that anyone who has actually worked in this industry for any length of time and is being honest will acknowledge the fact that a lot of human-produced websites/web applications are mediocre at best.
The idea that every website or web app was being built by skilled artisans dedicated to the finer arts of their craft before AI is not realistic. AI didn't create spaghetti code, for example.
A lot of AI work product leaves a lot to be desired, but the realistic comparison is not to the best of what existed prior. Frankly, a lot of vibe coded apps are more functional and usable than web apps I've seen built by cheap outsourcing firms based offshore.
The big change I've seen is that before if you knew what you were doing you had two options:
- Make something crappy fairly quickly
- Make something good a little slower
AI has introduced a third option:
- Make something really crappy at light speed
A lot of companies are very excited about this and it makes it hard to advocate for "make something good a little slower" (even though AI can help speed that up.)
It feels like a race to the bottom. Companies were already prioritizing speed over quality. With AI a lot of them are doubling down.
Except that AI also allows people to make something half-decent at light speed.
Yes, the average vibe coded app might not scale to millions of users, might not be perfectly secure, etc. but let's be honest: the freelance web developer you would have paid $25,000 to build your app a decade ago was in most cases not going to deliver a highly-scalable, highly-secure product either.
AI can allow companies to prioritize speed over quality, but it has also enabled lots of small businesses and entrepreneurs to actually build things that they wouldn't have if they had to pay a developer $xxx/hour.
It still makes it a tougher sell to deliver high quality more slowly
Side note: when it comes to front end I’m thinking less about scalability and security (though they apply) and more about performance, accessibility, reaponsiveness, quality UI, maintainability, basic design sense, etc.
In a case like this, it would be typical for all possible defendants to be named.
Since the Airbnb bookings were ostensibly made by individuals, most attorneys would also name those individuals (in addition to the company if the company was named).
Having your founders/management/employees rent houses via Airbnb is a really bad strategy for limiting your liability using a company.
> ...They recognize that individual immigrants can be fine but the large-scale flow of immigrants can create undesirable changes
You should also consider the other side of the equation, which is that immigration is the only thing that's keeping the US workforce and total population growing.
The size of the workforce and overall population has real economic, fiscal and quality of life impacts that every American feels on a daily basis and there's a very strong argument to be made that if your interest is in maintaining US wealth and "strength" globally, you don't want to become Japan, South Korea, Italy or Germany.
This is not to say that immigration policy should be made thoughtlessly or recklessly, but I rarely see the staunchest immigration opponents mentioning the stark demographic reality that faces the country.
56% of college grads are still looking for their first job 2 years later up from 25% for millennials. If you want to “grow the workforce” why not just hire the people already here?
Even if your statistic is true (which I don't believe it is), there are two issues here.
The first is that even if every graduate was hired tomorrow, it still wouldn't be enough to outpace the number of older workers leaving the workforce. The Social Security worker-to-retiree ratio was about 5:1 in 1960 and is about 2.7:1 now, and still dropping.
The second is that most new college grads aren't filling the jobs that need filling. The most acute shortages are in fields like agriculture, construction, home health/elder care, meat processing, and hospitality. Unless new grads are going to start doing farm work or taking care of the elderly, there still aren't enough American-born workers to meet the needs of the labor market.
So basically, immigration solves a different problem than the one you're referring to. Yours is a big one too but it's a separate issue.
Many tech/software people were completely unsympathetic if not downright arrogant when their products displaced people in other professions who felt the same way.
The lesson here is that ultimately, change comes for everyone.
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