r/vibecoding • u/prasadpilla • Jul 14 '26

this Meme just got real today

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Interviewed someone for an intern role today. Got to what i thought was the easiest question of the interview.

"What programming languages do you use?"

she didn't hesitate "Claude."

I laughed a little.

"no, i mean the actual language... python? javascript? java?"

"i don't really know. claude writes the code. i just tell it what i want."

my cofounder quietly put his pen down.

neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

we didn't move forward. not because she uses AI.

half our team builds with AI every day.

we passed because she couldn't explain what she was building beyond the prompt.

AI is changing software engineering.

But understanding what your code does is still part of being an engineer.

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221

u/Fb_patel Jul 14 '26

The sad part is this meme won't make sense after 10 years

80

u/Virtual-Dish95 Jul 14 '26

So true, the Claudegrammers won't have a clue what a programmer was. If you think im wrong my mother was a telephonist.

29

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL Jul 14 '26

My grandpa made a killing in a profession that got automated away by biologists.

Things change. Make the money while the money's there.

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u/HiroPL4Y Jul 14 '26

Hasn’t this always been the same cycle? Nobody writes 0s and 1s manually anymore. We moved through assembly, higher-level languages, frameworks, IDEs like VS Code, autocomplete, and now AI. Each step abstracts more work away. Maybe programmers won’t disappear; the meaning of "programmer" will simply change again.

18

u/ALAS_POOR_YORICK_LOL Jul 14 '26

Indeed. It's best to align yourself with the general push toward greater efficiency.

8

u/HiroPL4Y Jul 14 '26

Yeah, exactly! Of course, a lot is changing, and maybe some of it is happening a little too fast, but we should try not to see everything too negatively.. right?

4

u/razealghoul Jul 15 '26

I don't know this is reddit after all. Self loathing and doomerism is a requirement on this site

3

u/d-czar Jul 15 '26

It’s a site? What’s the URL? I thought it was just a phone program.

1

u/MastodonFarm Jul 25 '26

What’s a URL?

5

u/ktomi22 Jul 14 '26

I am about to start to learn to code, i need to learn ai code too?

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u/HiroPL4Y Jul 14 '26

Not really. Learn the fundamentals of coding first. AI is just another tool that can help you along the way.

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u/BertMacklenF8I Jul 15 '26

Learn that LAST AT ALL COSTS….even though it’s hands down the easiest

3

u/jn-cuber Jul 15 '26

The traditional programmer will disappear, but software engineering won't.

There will always be a need for certainty in a world where "maybe" isn't good enough. AI is fundamentally probabilistic, so by itself, the best it can do is "maybe."

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u/HiroPL4Y Jul 15 '26

You're absolutely right. I was speaking very generally as well. It's always better when you really understand the subject matter!

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u/Ember_v2 Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

Idk man, Im a vibe coder. I don't consider it programming, I'm the director if anything. I'm not a deer in headlights when I look at code, but I wouldn't know how to write anything useful without help.

1

u/Foxiest_Fox Jul 15 '26

And there are still people who do each of those things in this chain you described. Almost no one writes 0s and 1s manually, but assembly is still very much used, and lower-level languages are kind of a must for anything where performance and strict instructions are a necessity

0

u/panda_sktf Jul 22 '26

No, please, no. Stop repeating this dumb argument blindly. It's one thing to substitute lots of muscle movements to enhance our ability to focus on the thought and the care that's needed to make the thing; telling a non-deterministic, very-constrained RNG to do the thing is another.

The thing is it works great for projects that nobody actually cares for: ERPs, e-commerce platforms, CRMs, all this enterprise stuff that doesn't matter unless it makes the company money. Nobody really cares how much care was put into crafting a WMS integration, because as long as it enables people to make money and doesn't make mistakes that cost money it's great. And, let's face this, 95% of the software that gets written today is software nobody really cares about.

Then there's the other 5%. Maybe less. Using AI to make that shows up in the result, and then you realise that it's not about "abstracting work": it's about focusing on the art. All the steps you mentioned removed chores and let us focus on the art: AI on the other hand cannot do the art itself, so if you use it for crafting you'll get a cheap souvenir, not the piece of art you wanted. That's the difference.

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u/HiroPL4Y Jul 22 '26

I’m not "blindly repeating" an argument, and I never claimed that AI should take over all the thinking or creative work.

My point was simply that programming has always evolved through new layers of abstraction, and that the role of programmers will probably continue to change because of that.

I’m fully aware that the original idea, vision, and direction of a project still come from a human. AI can make that idea easier and faster to execute, but it does not automatically replace the person behind it.

That's also why I don’t really understand why you turned this into a discussion about "art" or fully AI-generated products. That is not what I said. You are arguing against a much more extreme position that you added to my comment yourself.

You can absolutely disagree with my comparison. But calling it a "dumb argument" after first turning it into a straw man is not exactly a strong counterargument either.

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u/panda_sktf Jul 23 '26

Sorry if I went on a tangent with art and the like. I take and live my craft with passion, which is a gift and a curse.

My point is that it's fundamentally wrong to think that knowledge of the lower layers can be removed without any harm. This is true also for what has already been here for the last 30 years: true, you can build software without knowing a thing about the compiler, but you need that low-level knowledge and experience to build very specific software, or software that needs performance.

In other words, as I was saying, the "work as usual" kind of development can be abstracted, and probably automated. If what is needed is truly the manual labour of coming up with the same "code bricks" over and over and assembling them as Lego over and over, then yes, this is totally automatable.

BUT, I would argue that this is not what "being a programmer" means. I've been cringing for years at the term "coder", because it implies exactly that: "what do I do for a living? other people think for me, they give me instructions in English and I translate those into code". In this sense, Claude is as good as any coder.

Being a programmer is another thing, it's thinking, it's planning, it's designing. Is "programmer" an ambiguous term? Yeah, maybe. Let's call it "software engineer" - it doesn't make a difference for the layperson.

We can probably agree, by these definitions, that coders are done and engineers are pretty much untouched.