If you've subjected yourself to the social media hype cycle since the beginning of the Christmas break, you'd think that this industry was burned to the ground and reborn from the ashes overnight. From my desk, though, things don't really look that different. The teams I lead are busy gathering requirements from stakeholders, making solid architectural decisions, implementing thorough specifications, and doing rigorous quality control. They're just looking at a different screen than they used to for some of that work.
The Twitter hype fails to capture the fact that the fundamentals of software ownership haven't changed. Some AI-maximalists will disagree on this point, but I suspect time will prove them wrong. A well-scoped, well-architected application will perform better and cost less to maintain over its lifespan than its poorly executed counterpart. Vibe coding, in its purest form, is simply a way of replacing cheap offshore labor with an overpowered autocomplete.
The nuance that is lost in the conversation is that a solo developer with 20 years of experience really can one-shot a high-quality application because they know what to ask for. They aren't vibe coding. They're instructing their agents to use specific architectural patterns. They're carefully choosing their stacks and dependencies. They're using all the right keywords to ensure that Claude makes the site responsive and accessible. And when something goes wrong, they see it and course-correct quickly.
The first-timer can also one-shot a working application, but all of these core decisions about how to build the application are left to an unaccountable, unpredictable system that will get some things right and some things catastrophically wrong. But this isn't new. Some founders have always reached for the cheapest option in a marketplace to get a criminally low price on fixed-bid projects, leaving all of these important decisions to someone with no particular expertise and no skin in the game beyond a quick paycheck.
There is no doubt that AI will continue to reshape how we do our jobs in this industry for the foreseeable future. Tooling and models will continue to evolve quickly. Most of the "game-changers" will turn out to be short-lived fads. Use what works. Don't be afraid to experiment and iterate. But don't lose sight of the fundamentals. The ingredients of great software haven't changed and won't any time soon. We're just looking for the next great gadget to cook them in.