Building software has become performative. One dude makes a tweet, you only read the first half of it and start the biggest brainrot campaign this industry has ever seen with unquestioned groupthink. You're typing English into a machine and call a precise process "vibes"? You really think outsourcing writing and thinking to a closed AI company gives you an advantage? They fucking own your ass now!
I'm not going to lobotomize myself by leaving thinking to a machine. The bare minimum used to be understanding every single instruction, now you want me to use a vague prompt.
Since when did incompetence get a fucking medal? In what fucking way does a person with lesser understanding replace someone with deeper awareness?
The aversion to learning and understanding is really fucking disturbing. English doesn't compile, there's always code you are held liable for. When there's another Therac-25, it'll be your fault. But I guess you won't even know why it happened because you haven't gone through the motions to learn how things work, a clanker did it for you.
Our industry got swallowed in self-delusion and started being okay with everyone paying a subscription for a skill larping as capable programmers. Every damn time I open a tech Twitter thread it's filled with comments made up of pseudo-intellectual nonsense paraphrasing other "thought leaders" from a month ago. This space suddenly has a lot of herd mentality going on while bragging about the lines of code written. More is better right?
This is not an argument of abstractions or going from "assembly to C" when you're giving up determinism. My dear friend, this is you becoming a cognitive vegetable wrapped in VC funding and rage-bait Twitter takes while giving up your abilities just to pretend to be "embracing AI". Having 5 different subagents strung together with a .md file talking to an MCP server isn't gonna help you avoid complexity. Your setup is the complexity, now with fairy dust™.
This damn field used to have a bare-minimum common sense requirement called "learning to code". It self-selected grifters out because you had to use your brain to think, have fundamental understanding and dedicate time to get started.
Now tech is filled with people suffering from toxic Dunning-Kruger effect thinking they're better than everyone else (self-irony), yelling "software engineering is dead" every 6 months. As if writing prompts was more advanced?... What will you do when VCs stop subsidizing tokens?
Time spent learning skills develops taste-primitives in a person. Skipping this means everything online is filling up with random shit so fucking fast it'll become impossible to buy a legible domain name. Cash-grab apps are piling up in the app stores with minimal thought put into them because it costs nothing to build them. Sponsored posts exploded for AI wrappers completely skirting deceptive advertising laws, triggering FOMO without having the balls (read: real features) to back up the claims.
But I guess you don't care anymore.
There used to be an "I give a fuck" attitude here before the manufactured urgency of falling behind every 6 hours. People didn't spout repeated anti-skill vitriol threating you with obsolescence.
I use these damn tools every day and like them. I've been writing assisted code with "agents" before it had a name. But the incentives of people these automations are bringing into the field are not beneficial for the long run and will hurt us. When you destroy the barrier to entry, you'll drown in mediocrity with no taste.