Some people cannot do anything without a tool. These people are early adopters and power users, who then evangelize their latest discovery.
GitHub's value proposition was that mediocre coders can appear productive in the maze of PRs, reviews, green squares, todo lists etc.
LLMs again give mediocre coders the appearance of being productive by juggling non-essential tools and agents (which their managers also love).
I think it is very simple to draw the line at "something that tries to write for you", you know, an agent by definition. I am beginning to realize people simply would prefer to manage, even if the things they end up managing aren't actually humans. So it creates a nice live action role-play situation.
A better name for vibecoding would be larpcoding, because you are doing a live action role-play of managing a staff of engineers.
Now not only even a junior engineer can become a manager, they will start off their careers managing instead of doing. Terrifying.
It’s not a clear line though. Compilers have been writing programs for us. The plaintext programming language code that we talk about is but a spec for the actual program.
From this perspective, English-as-spec is a natural progression in the direction we’ve been going all along.
What is an essential tool? IDE? Editor? Pencil? Can I scratch my code into a French cave wall if I want to be a senior developer?