[0:00]I have to tell you a secret, while I enjoy the Reddit drama and the Twitter toxicity as much as anyone else, LinkedIn is by far my favorite app when I'm looking for real unhinged delusional content.
[0:10]If you are not that familiar with it, LinkedIn is the place where the fake it till you make it business professionals come to share their pretentious opinions about absolutely everything.
[0:19]But something strange happened in the past year or so. All your project managers, operations managers, accounting managers, task managers and QA managers discovered ChatGPT.
[0:29]And they are using ChatGPT to generate low effort articles on how ChatGPT is helping them 10x everything.
[0:36]use AI? Absolutely. use ChatPT? Do you love ChatPT? I love ChatPT. I love it.
[0:41]ChatT is is fantastic. It say not ChatT.
[0:46]Then they discovered Claude and they generate more low effort articles about how Claude is helping them 10x the ChatGBT 10x.
[0:53]These are the people who for the past year hyped up vibe coding up to the point where the Collins dictionary had to declare it the word of the year in November.
[1:02]Vibe coding was supposed to change everything. It would finally deprecate those weird geeks with no social skills and high paying jobs.
[1:09]It would turn all those managers into millionaire solopreneurs and it would help companies cut human costs and increase their profits.
[1:15]But now, just one year after the idea of vibe coding was formalized, the very same people who were generating low effort articles about how vibe coding would make them millionaire solopreneurs are now generating low effort articles about how vibe coding is dead.
[1:29]Don't get excited though, because we are not yet abandoning all this nonsense. The next delusional iteration is to replace vibe coding with vibe engineering and agentic engineering.
[1:40]My expectation is that we need another 6 to 12 months to completely discard the vibe and agentic terminology and the industry will settle on simply calling the process of building software engineering.
[1:50]So, what is Vibe and Agentic engineering? It is, and I want you to brace yourself for this revelation, software engineering.
[1:57]It is just software engineering, the kind that has been practiced since the 1960s by the weird geeks your operations manager was so excited to replace.
[2:05]Please let me walk you through the earth shattering innovations of Agentic Engineering. First, you write a specification where you write down what the thing is supposed to do before you build it.
[2:14]Then you break the work into smaller, well-defined tasks. This is called task decomposition and it is covered in the first two weeks of any computer science degree and also in approximately every project management certification your manager already has framed on their wall.
[2:28]Then you thoroughly review the code before merging it. And if the review and prompt iteration are taking too long, you might as well write that piece of code yourself just like in the old days when it was simply faster to fix a bug yourself than to delegate it to a less experienced colleague.
[2:43]Yes, we are basically slowly going back to building software like we did a couple of years ago, but we are framing it as a completely new thing.
[2:50]What actually happened here is straightforward. A lot of non-engineers got very excited that AI would let them skip the engineering part of software engineering.
[2:59]They tried it and the software was bad. Now they are rebuilding, doing it properly as a novel methodology and giving it a new name so they can continue generating content about it.
[3:09]There is a lot of pushback in the software community when it comes to AI code generation, mostly because we all know this is not a magic bullet.
[3:17]And there is a huge difference between somebody with no technical knowledge vibe coding an app and an actual software developer generating some code with AI.
[3:25]The process might look the same on the surface, but the results will be vastly different. For the past year, a lot of people have tried to make it look like the outcome of vibe coding is the same regardless of the technical knowledge of the person doing the vibing.
[3:39]This is what got a lot of non-technical people really excited and a lot of technical people, me included, very frustrated.
[3:44]Another common LinkedIn article was generated around this idea of coding advancing from low level assembly to higher level languages and now to plain English.
[3:52]So if English can be used to build software, then everybody can do it and we are all the protagonist in our own the social network movie.
[3:59]Do you like being a bot? Do you like being a bot? Do you want to go back to that?
[4:03]But what's funny is that plain English is now being quickly simplified to cut down on output tokens while maintaining full technical accuracy.
[4:09]Plugins like caveman are extremely popular because it turns out that when you are paying per token, make button blue is more cost effective than please help me modify the visual appearance of the aforementioned interactive element to reflect the color of the ocean.
[4:24]Just wait until these guys find out that it's even cheaper, easier and probably even faster to simply open the IDE and add in the color blue CSS rule directly.
[4:33]This is the ultimate irony of the vibe era. We were told AI would make software development more human, but instead, it's making humans talk like cavemen just to keep the API bill under four figures.
[4:45]If you find yourself typing update of, no fluff, just code, make no mistakes, you've just invented a really inefficient, expensive version of a programming language.
[4:54]So here's my main issue with all this. Whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay, it will disrupt the industries and it will displace some jobs.
[5:01]It has some very good use cases and some decent use cases. Sure, the financials don't make any sense yet and once we get over the customer acquisition phase, we'll have to pay much more for these services.
[5:13]But AI is happening and we can see it across the board. However, this is not enough for some people. Having humans use AI as a tool while they keep their jobs is not cost efficient, is not disrupting enough and it doesn't get any real engagement.
[5:29]So we get tweets such as this one where some armchair expert knows for certain that the next opus model is going to destroy all software companies.
[5:37]But then the next week comes, Opus 4.7 is released and it immediately fails one of the most basic reasoning tests.
[5:43]And some of you will argue that this is cherry picking, but then another day passes and the overwhelming consensus on the cloud subreddit is that Opus 4.7 is a massive regression and a serious downgrade from 4.6.
[5:55]Apparently, 4.7 ignores instructions, hallucinates, fabricates web searches, invents coworkers named Anton, pads responses with useless fillers and burns through usage limits at an alarming rate for worse output.
[6:07]On the other hand, they managed to make it more human because 4.7 is constantly trying to call it a day or pick this up later after only a few messages, refusing to do the work.
[6:19]I don't know about you, but that's how I approach all my Jira tickets these days. So, by the looks of it, if vibe coding was the word of the year 2025, I expect plateauing to be the word of 2026.
[6:29]And since some people are so excited about writing code in plain English, here is your awesome trivia of the day.
[6:37]When Grace Hopper and her peers designed Cobal, which stands for common business-oriented language, they planned for managers and non-programmers to be able to read and write code in English-like syntax.
[6:48]And while Cobal became the backbone of global finance even to this day, it failed Hopper's specific goal of democratizing programming.
[6:58]Instead of empowering non-technical managers to build complex systems, it just forced programmers to write extremely verbose, rigid and ultimately difficult to maintain code.
[7:05]What's funny is that because Cobal was designed to be easy to read, early programmers tried to save memory by using two digits for years.
[7:12]This led to the Y2K bug, which caused billions of dollars to fix and many Cobal programmers were brought back into the workforce because the business managers, who were supposed to be able to maintain the code, couldn't actually handle the technical debt.
[7:26]The conclusion is really straightforward. Vibe coding with non-technical people simply doesn't work. As writing code becomes cheaper, everything that follows becomes more expensive.
[7:35]Teams now deal with higher code churn where large volumes of generated code are quickly rewritten, reverted or patched. Developers increasingly act as reviewers, integrators and debuggers, where the real cost lies in judgment rather than generation.
[7:48]So less time goes into typing, while more effort is required for validation, debugging and long-term maintenance, and these are the areas where technical skills really matter.
[7:57]If you like this video, you should consider joining our community where I'm posting more dedicated weekly content.
[8:03]Please don't forget to smash all the buttons and until next time, thank you for watching.
