Recently I was listening to a Lex Fridman podcast featuring DHH. In this pod they were wrestling with the term “programmer” while discussing the use of AI to generate code. The analogy they used was the boss that tells programmers what to code is no more a programmer than an “agentic prompter” is a programmer so they didn’t like calling “vibe programmers”, programmers.
“Vibe-ing” is apparently what people do when they get an LLM or AI Agent to generate code. I had no idea I had become a “vibe programmer” some time ago. They used the term to identify people with zero coding skills using AI to generate code as well. I don’t think it matters if you know how to code. Vibe programming is vibe programming is vibe programming. In fact I think if you are an average programmer like me, my biases and skill gaps might be misunderstood by the AI and it could generate less than optimal code.
I disagree with the idea that vibe programmers are not real programmers. I think Lex Fridman and DHH were stuck using terminology from a different paradigm in the timeline of computing. DHH said it perfectly when he said something to the effect of “Last November is an entire generation of AI ago and another generation has happened since February”. This I agree with. Six months ago, I was still checking the output of agents. Now I have another agent do the testing and code evaluation for me. My already weak coding skills have almost vanished.
I think that DHH is (or should I saw was?) an expert programmer-coder. For years we have been using programmer and coder interchangeably and I think AI is the reason to separate the terms now. A coder is a person that types code. Code is a set of instructions for a computer. Programming, is the idea of what the computer would do as a result of that code, just like the program manager at a radio station builds a program for that station. For the first 40 years of computing, the programmer was generally assumed to also be the coder thus we use the terms interchangeably.
In the world of Agentic AI, the agents or bots, are the coders, and the prompt engineers are the creators or programmers. In the world of open source, creators and programmers have slightly different jobs. The creator is the dreamer that says is would be great if…. They see the problem and have a vision of what a solution might look like.
The programmer is the person that describes it in a way that the agents can generate code that causes a computer to do what the creator wanted it to do.
As we move forward in time I think the programmer-coder is now evolving into the creator-programmer and the coder is simply the agent.
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