All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

This will be a big problem in the future if it means more companies choosing not to hire/train juniors.

Eventually all the experienced people will be dead or retired.

The answer here is two-fold --

1) that the tools become more Socratic and interactive and educational and walk the engineer through what they're doing

2) juniors pair with a senior who is using the tool and see the process and the decisions being made.

I know the industry wants these things to replace us, but in fact it's more like a power drill than a spinning jenny. It augments and lets the existing craftsmen work better faster, but does not replace / automate really.

Assuming the current way to become senior is the only way?

I could still see a select few being given a foot in the door and leaping over the "argh why doesn't it compile" stage, past the "argh, I need a whole new architecture" stage to become senior in a few years. Every cohort has a few unicorns.

Alternatively, coding goes the way of the calculator. By that I mean, the people that used to be part of the engineering team, doing arithmetic. You just hire domain experts and give them the AI hoping the domain expertise is all you need to get you through the day.

Finance has historically had a lot of people who thought they could code, now perhaps they will get better. Big risk of it becoming a mess larger than back when they got VBA.

Idk I honestly feel like it makes junior developers more valuable. Junior are devs are often a cost as make as an asset, cause they take a lot of time and attention away from senior devs.

Now a junior can ask an AI like 90% of questions that would otherwise occupy a senior:

- Why does this dockerfile copy these files first? - how can I find the entrypoints to this service? - is there anything related to image processing in this entire project?

LLMs let juniors punch above their weight, and it lets seniors go faster. Of course if everybody is twice as efficient, you don’t need as many devs (debatable), but I don’t think junior devs are going anywhere. I hear a lot of CEO hype posts saying junior devs are outdated, but idk it doesn’t make any sense to me!

I don't see "senior vibe coder" going in any way that doesn't end in constant forest fires that they try to put out with a flamethrower. This happens even with seasoned engineers. Unicorn hunting for the exceptions will be every bit as infeasible in 2045 as it was in 2005.

> You just hire domain experts and give them the AI hoping the domain expertise is all you need to get you through the day.

what domain experts? Clearly they are trying to replace everyone with AI. That's the unsettling part of the whole story; this phenomenon is happening across many sectors who want to try and skimp out on talent.

>Now a junior can ask an AI like 90% of questions that would otherwise occupy a senior:

And how does a Junior in this kind of work gain the skills that transitions them to senior?

>I hear a lot of CEO hype posts saying junior devs are outdated, but idk it doesn’t make any sense to me!

well yes, they aren't making sense. Hence why I think this is all a bubble. Irrational markets and all that.

I don't know when it will burst, but even tech companis can't reject reality forever.

>I know the industry wants these things to replace us

sadly, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It will correct itself long term, but the damage over the last few years will linger for years, maybe even decades to come.

> And how does a Junior in this kind of work gain the skills that transitions them to senior?

Um - by asking AI 90% of the time, and the senior 10% of the time. If anything, the senior can now mentor 10x the number of juniors.