You write business software. You are not an artist or code poet. No one cares about “software craftsmanship.” Your boss is right—learn the new way of doing things and code faster. Or just do what Tom did after meeting a 20-something keyboard clacker who knew how to google—retire. That’s it. Vibe code or retire.
Are LLMs really that good? Yes. Can you generate complete applications? Yes. Will the output suck? Only if you do. You see, this is not a panacea. The new “you can do it without coding” isn’t any different from the last generation of “you can do it without coding” tools. They sort of work without coding, unless you need a 2.0 or something complicated. Just like before (nothing has changed), they are just faster and better.
Give it time
Your first application using vibe coding tools will be terrible, and you will find it frustrating, and you will be bad at it. That is not the tool’s problem. It is yours. This is partly because these tools have the maturity and stability of JBuilder, Visual Basic 4.2 (maybe not that bad), and JavaScript 1.0. When you use them, they do aberrant things that annoy you, and you want to rage quit. Then, you learn to adapt, work with them, and start being faster. If you’re even a little good at coding, they’ll slow you down after the initial scaffolding. You’ll shake your head at some of its decisions, and then you’ll learn to make it do what you want—just like with every new development tool or technology before it.
