The argument that "vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses" is something I don't understand. With all the free content on the internet, was it not accessible before?

It takes most people years of burying their heads in a computer to become effective programmers of anything more than trivial software. This is rapidly changing.

That hasn't changed at all. You simply cannot be an effective programmer using AI. Heck, if you're having the thing write programs for you then you aren't a programmer at all at that point, because programming is the act of writing code. But you can't make good software if you just have the LLM bang it out for you, so nothing has changed.

Obviously the knowledge gap required to go from zero to doing something useful has shrunk substantially. That is improved accessibility.

It does things for them and tells them what to do. Is that really making programming more accessible? I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff. But accessible as in a path to actually start working on things yourself and developing an interest? For most people vibe coding 99% of their lines, I doubt it. And I don't really think that's a problem to be honest, but I don't really buy that it makes programming in and of itself more accessible, more just the result of that programming.

> I guess in the sense of lowering the barrier to creating stuff.

That is the sense which I think most important. There are millions upon millions of very bright people with lots of valuable domain experience in a massive variety of specialities other than computer programming, who will now be able to use their expertise to guide the creation of software which before would have taken them many years of study, or millions of dollars to hire programmers. Empowering people to create their own tools will be a massive boon to humanity.

It doesn't have to be used that way, though. I wouldn't disagree that it mostly is used that way, but it can just as easily be used to teach. My wife has proven that well. AI has been the best development ever for her because it can custom tailor the lesson/task to be hyper relevant to exactly what she is trying to do.

Personally I've always preferred a great book to blogs/tutorials/etc, and even still I'd reach for a book if I had the chance on a new programming language or anything. But not everyone learns well that way, and I accept that.

I disagree, I think the over-reliance in these tools turns AI providers into the final gatekeepers of the profession. And with the raising prices of hardware, I'm afraid AI will make computing as a whole inaccessible to most people.

The best counter to this is to just forego these tools and develop actual knowledge. Knowledge & skill is still power, no matter what the AI propagandists say

> an incredibly based individual

This was never the case.

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me.

I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this.

Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be.

AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more.

I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there.

Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced.

It's awesome.

I'm debating using LLMs for my side projects. Does using one remove the "soul" of my project? On the other hand, a friend is actually making progress with his side app _because_ he's able to lean on the LLM after a full day's worth of working the day job. I might be able to actually do some of the things I've dreamed of and never had the capacity for. First world problems, I guess.

I've been doing exactly this now for a little while, and it breathed new life into my projects. It's been amazing, honestly. I was worried about the "soul" as well, especially for some projects where I got intimately deep in bit shifting and things, but realistically that project is now 100x more useful to me because it has a ton of features and even bug fixes that I never would have spent the time on before. I highly recommend it.

I think it depends on what you are doing the side project for.

Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how.

Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code.

I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...).

But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.

Computer programming has been accessible to the masses for years. All you need is motivation to learn.

The only people vibe coding has made programming accessible to is people who don't have such motivation.

I disagree. I’ve had almost 20 years of professional programming experience. Spent a decade in FAANG, the rest in startups.

It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too.

I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy.

Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true.

However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.

I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.

They absolutely were. The parallels are stark.

We've had this discussion back when high-level languages started becoming popular. Do the unwashed masses deserve to be programming a computer when they don't have a love and appreciation for assembly, or even the underlying ISA and its instruction encoding? And before that: How dare these whippersnappers just hand in their punched cards when they don't even know how to bit bang the boot sequence of the very computer executing them?

It's not even limited to a given occupation. Many hams were outraged about the FCC handing out amateur radio licenses without ANY demonstrated proficiency in morse!

Fortunately, at least in technology, nobody cares what these gatekeepers say. I guess that's an upside of software engineering never having graduated to be "actual engineering" (i.e. one with certifications and personal liability).

Nobody is preventing anyone from going as deep as they want to, and I expect that going one layer (or ten) deeper in understanding than your peers will still pay off even in a post-AI world. The nice thing is that now, nobody has to to just try something. (And you can ask the same system building these things for you how they work!)

You could use this exact same argument about any discipline and/or tool that has been made to support that discipline. A part of me loathes to make the comparison, but is an "audio engineer" any less of a musician than a traditional pianist? Maybe? It probably depends, but music has been made more accessible by the introduction of digital tools.

Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

This is BY FAR the worst part of LLMs to me. The influx of people i have zero desire to interact with into my normal online spaces has been incredibly painful.

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

To those who can afford the subscriptions, sure.