Vibecoding presumes the purpose of programmers is to produce lines of code, and replaces that.
Has anyone involved stopped to question this at all?
The fundamental purpose of programming is to understand a problem well. The code itself is just a temporary expression of possible solutions within that understanding. The value is in the understanding, not the lines of code -although the code can become a document of that understanding readable by other people.
“Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Harold Abelson
Vibecoding seems to be a great case of 'double click' thinking (Bruno Latour, I think) where great emphasis is placed on skipping to the end of a process, while missing out all the messy stuff in the middle - which is of course where all the real value lies.
I feel like this might be being born out by the fact that none of this technology seems to be improving anything - software everywhere seems to be degrading quite quickly. I wonder if this is the reason why?