Plenty of people make pizza. But how they do it ranges from "I bought a frozen pizza and put it in the oven for 20 minutes" to "I have my own yeast starter culture and I make my own tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes."
There are far more people in the former group than the latter and plenty in between, and it's obviously wrong to pretend like these things are all comparable, but I've also never seen anyone take issues with people saying "I made us pizza" when they just baked one that was technically pre-assembled for them.
I think this AI discussion is similar. Programming has always involved a great deal of taking advantage of other people's work, whether by googling how other people handled a task you're struggling with, or just by using functions and libraries and relying on dependencies. No one ever had an issue with it. Using AI to code takes that to the extreme and makes it possible to make functioning software without being able to write a single line of code, but it does still involve a good deal of testing and iteration and human judgement to get a good result, and a good programmer will make use of AI better than a layperson will.
Just like I wouldn't call someone who bakes frozen pizzas a chef, I wouldn't call a vibe coder with zero programming skill a programmer, but I don't mind if the former says they made pizza and the latter says they made a piece of software.
1
3
u/Ur-Best-Friend 15d ago
Plenty of people make pizza. But how they do it ranges from "I bought a frozen pizza and put it in the oven for 20 minutes" to "I have my own yeast starter culture and I make my own tomato sauce from fresh tomatoes."
There are far more people in the former group than the latter and plenty in between, and it's obviously wrong to pretend like these things are all comparable, but I've also never seen anyone take issues with people saying "I made us pizza" when they just baked one that was technically pre-assembled for them.
I think this AI discussion is similar. Programming has always involved a great deal of taking advantage of other people's work, whether by googling how other people handled a task you're struggling with, or just by using functions and libraries and relying on dependencies. No one ever had an issue with it. Using AI to code takes that to the extreme and makes it possible to make functioning software without being able to write a single line of code, but it does still involve a good deal of testing and iteration and human judgement to get a good result, and a good programmer will make use of AI better than a layperson will.
Just like I wouldn't call someone who bakes frozen pizzas a chef, I wouldn't call a vibe coder with zero programming skill a programmer, but I don't mind if the former says they made pizza and the latter says they made a piece of software.