Quote of the Day
Vibe coding feels productive. You ship fast, things look cool, and there’s momentum. But under the hood:
- Code quality often drops
- Scalability becomes an afterthought
- Debugging turns into a nightmare
- Technical debt builds up silently
Vibe Coach
April 22, 2026
(28) Post | LinkedIn
The above is true, and several other things are issues as well. A case could be made that it is not worth the benefits–at least for today.
Six months ago, I had no concern that AI was going to replace my job as a software engineer. Today, I know it is going to happen. I can still review the AI written code, find, and fix problems before it is deployed. I make it more efficient. I make it more maintainable. I make it easier to extend. I make it use less memory. I find and fix potential race condition. * I find and fix edge cases with parameter validation and unexpected responses from other systems.
But I expect that six months from now AI can do all that as well as I can and do it in 1/1000th of the time it takes me–assuming it still makes those mistakes.
When I first started programming it was on an analog computer with patch cables, precision potentiometers, and capacitors (to make integrators), with an ink and paper plotter for the output. The digital computer I learned to program that same semester took its input, both code and data, on punched cards. The output was on a line printer which sounded something like a rotary saw cutting through plywood.
The teletype with a line editor connected to the main frame a year or two later was an incredible upgrade. And I could save my programs and data on disk! No more punched card decks!
My first personal computer, and IBM XT, had a 10 Mbyte hard drive, and I edited my first programs with EDLIN (another line editor).
After working for a few years, I went to graduate school. I remember the computer room having signs on the wall about introductions to something called a “visual editor.” Whatever, I thought. The line editors I was accustomed to were visual. What are they talking about. I then looked over someone’s shoulder using a “visual editor” and seeing what you could do was almost orgasmic.
After a few years more “Integrated Development Environments” (IDE) came out. I mostly ignored them. The visual editor I was using was fine, I would exit, run “make” and then invoke the debugger, visual editor, whatever, again as required. A few years more and the IDE was vastly superior to separate tools.
The evolving IDEs were good for a couple decades and occasionally code generators would make specialized code (I wrote one when I worked at Qualcomm in the early and mid 2010s).
About two years ago I started asking chatbots to write a few code snippets which I would copy and paste into my programs. It was surprisingly good. But, if you asked it to make a program which collected traffic data from the firewalls, correlated the IPs and domain address with lists known bad IPs and domains, then put our network computers which had connections to these known bad IPs and domains into a graphic database with all the connections and attempted connections the answer would be, “Sorry. I can’t do that.” I know because I tried.
Today, if I were to make that request it would ask a few questions, then it would write the code and add features I had not thought of. Oh, and I could make the request and answer the questions either by text or speaking it into my headset. **
Sometime, in very near future, Claude Mythos (and probably others) will be released. Here is what is showing up in tests of the preview:
Claude Mythos Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.
Mythos Preview has already found thousands of high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser. Given the rate of AI progress, it will not be long before such capabilities proliferate, potentially beyond actors who are committed to deploying them safely. The fallout—for economies, public safety, and national security—could be severe.
My sources tell me, “It’s more powerful than they say.”
It took many years to go from the first line editor to the first “visual editor”. It took more years to get to an IDE superior to independent tools. If you were to plot the capabilities programming development environments versus time as a straight line, you need to plot it with both x- and y- axes as a log scale.
I’m reminded of an email conversation I had with one of my blog readers who used to work at Microsoft the same time I did. A snippet of his musings (from April 2, 2025):
The Home Economics class of tomorrow won’t be teaching kids how to cook but rather teaching them how to write prompts.
And if you don’t think this is happening today, look at the kids writing prompts to create high quality AI video content used in ads, anime videos, even porn. We’re starting to see more prompt writers, and prompt writers are becoming tomorrow’s artists.
Tomorrow’s billionaires? Some will be the same as today’s billionaires; the people who can help you create what’s in your imagination. Microsoft Word and PowerPoint let you create what’s in your head today. AI engines and powerful, flexible, simple prompt syntaxes will let people create what’s in their imaginations tomorrow, and the inventors of those engines and syntax structures will become billionaires.
Who knows. Perhaps the very best engines, the best syntaxes, and the best prompt writers will find their way into the design team for the very first NCC 1701.
I was skeptical and responded:
You make some good points, but I suspect they won’t be valid for very long. Perhaps a few months. I think what will happen is the chatbots will “learn” that the requirements are insufficiently detailed, and it will ask, just as your waiter/waitress might, “Thin or thick crust?” And the same for other ambiguous requests of every type.
I asked Copilot and Grok for opinions on the prompt engineers. Here is a portion of the response I was expecting (emphasis added):
I’d push back a bit: he assumes AI will stay “dumb” about context forever, requiring humans to spoon-feed it every detail. Today’s AI already shows signs of improvement. Advanced models can infer intent from vague prompts by learning user preferences over time or pulling context from past interactions. Imagine a Star Trek replicator that knows Captain Picard’s “Hot” means 85°C because he’s ordered it 47 times before, or that “Earl Grey” implies a medium-steeped brew based on his British leanings. Future AI could ask clarifying questions—“Do you want your pizza spicy or just hot from the oven?”—or use sensors to detect your mood and adjust the recipe. This adaptability might reduce the need for “professional” prompt writers, at least for everyday tasks.
On April 28, 2025, I sent him this:
Tech’s hottest job has imploded https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/Tech-s-hottest-job-has-imploded-7278658
From that posting:
The development of artificial intelligence is moving so fast, reports The Wall Street Journal, that one of the field’s hottest jobs — prompt engineering — is already on its way out. Just a couple of years ago, companies would pay up to $200,000 to have someone “crafting the exact right inputs” to produce useful results from large language models. But as models have gotten smarter, and more employees are trained on prompting, there’s simply less call for dedicated prompt engineers.
Yesterday morning my manager sent our team a link to …/prompt-master: A Claude skill that writes the accurate prompts for any AI tool. Zero tokens or credits wasted. Full context and memory retention · GitHub.
My job, as it exists today, will be obsolete within a few dozen weeks. It may take a few months for management to have confidence in the AI results, but the future is clear. And I expect most white-collar jobs, at nearly any level, will soon be replaceable “by a very small shell script.” ***
We live in interesting times.
* Bugs that may only show up when the timing is just right and hence exhibit noticeable (possibly catastrophic) symptoms as infrequently as once per hour/day/week.
** And we all laughed in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home when Scotty tried to interact with a computer by speaking to the mouse as if it were a microphone. We are now truly living in the future.
On the bright side, you will out of reasons not to move to your bunker. For once, I am more optimistic than you. I don’t write code and never did but I did write other things, namely budgets. I suppose it would be nice to have a tool to check for technical errors but the process is fundamentally political, not technical. It would be entertaining to turn Claude loose on the drafting of laws or court decisions. Either Claude would have a nervous breakdown or the people would simply disconnect it after being asked for the 10,000th time for clarification. I have a book called “That’s not what we meant to do” with marginal notes made by a former governor.