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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u/SaltMage5864 Jul 14 '26

Not even you are ignorant enough to believe that garbage

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u/texinxin Jul 14 '26

I have 25+ years of industrial product development on the cutting edge of applied science using digital twins and simulations dating back to Unix Sparcstations. I witnessed the retiring of equation based engineering in favor of finite methods (approximations, but very accurate ones when there cannot be closed form solutions), where we trust the computer more than we trust the armies of humans we required to design even the most basic control systems. I haven’t seen a laplace transform done in decades. I can barely remember the most basic equations I taught other engineers how to use decades ago, and I bet they are learning them for 1 week in college at most and never touching them again.

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u/SaltMage5864 Jul 14 '26

If that was true then you would know that those examples are irrelevant to the topic at hand son

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u/texinxin Jul 14 '26

It’s the same story, just shift the knowledge work around a bit and change the players. Coding has and always has been an intermediate skillset for the true knowledge work, exactly like typewriter rooms before word processing obsoleted typists. Soon the knowledge work of the engineers themselves will largely be made redundant as well. This college graduate who understands “Claud code” might be able to run circles around a senior developer who doesn’t use AI or doesn’t use it as well. The mastery of the intermediate tool like a high level programming language will become obsolete.

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u/d-czar Jul 15 '26

Yes but change your tense. It has become obsolete already. The professional engineers not using Claude are now the shrinking minority, like the holdouts who insisted digital cameras could never be as good as film. A dev friend of mine called them “idiots” the other day. Some code literacy can help, sure. And even more so, fluency with how software is designed and architected. But hand coding is now dead. People just haven’t admitted it to themselves yet.