Learn Vibe Coding in 10 Years

I’ve been talking to many programmers who are angry at AI for stealing their jobs lately, and one thing that they all say is that they’re angry because they wasted many years learning programming topics like pointers, data structures, and other complicated stuff, just for AI to get invented and make all their knowledge worthless. This way of think is wrong, and I’ll tell you why.

The idea is that AI is so good at programming that you could take any dork who knows how to use a computer, have them install Claude Code, and then they’ll be able to ship software products to customers within the next hour. This is completely false because AI was created by programmers for programmers.

AI is simply a tool that allows programmers to extract more knowledge out of their own brains. Let’s look at the pointers example. If a programmer doesn’t know anything about pointers, but their current software project requires extensive use of pointers, AI could certainly write code that utilizes pointers. Models like Claude Opus are really good at generating code, so you don’t even need to do manual code review anymore. Does that mean that your knowledge about pointers is useless?

No. To understand why, let’s look at another scenario. Suppose that there are two ways to solve a problem:

1. Write code that uses pointers.
2. Write code that doesn’t use pointers.

AI will simply generate code that looks similar to what’s in its training data. If the code in there uses pointers, that’s the kind of code it will generate. It doesn’t matter if pointers are better for your current project or not, it’s simply what other people have been using when solving similar problems.

That’s where your knowledge comes into play. If you know from your own experience, that pointers aren’t the right tool for the job right now, you can instruct the AI to not generate code that uses it. Thanks to you, AI is able to do the right thing, and thanks to AI, you were able to look at this problem in different angles, and choose the correct solution.

So, don’t get discouraged about your knowledge being useless. Unless AI is able to gain experience on its own, your knowledge is still useful today. That won’t be the case forever, because there will be time when AI will be able to acquire experience on its own, but you’re safe for now.

Howevever, junior programmers are completely useless in this case because they don’t have the experience that senior programmers have, so they’ll likely make the same mistakes that AI makes because of their poor judgement. Both junior programmers and AI will blindly follow “industry best practices”, for example. So, junior programmers still need to spend 10 years to gain experience, before they can be considered as good vibe coders.