End of Programming As We Knew It

Buckle up because this will be quite a journey. Try to read the whole thing in one go.

I want to make a website

Most of the programmers start their programming journey having a thought, "I want to make a/that website".
This is start of learning HTML/CSS/JS. The feeling that we get when we put something on index.html and open it on browser. It happens again when you change the background color to black and the text color to red. It happens yet again when you put a button to change the text color from red to blue and back to red.
This is what we started with. Everything came from us, the idea and the code.

I want to share this to a friend

Now you know the basics of webdev and you want to learn more. YTubers suggested to get started with react as you can combine HTML/CSS/JS in a meaningful way. You learned react and created you first to-do app. Still, idea from you, code from you. Now, you are into animations and dabble with framer motion and cloned an animated landing page.

Now the real shit happens. You thought of a cool website idea and start to build upon it. Initial scaffolding is done and now its time for you to get that idea out of your head and create functions, schema, apis, ui, landing page and fix bugs for it. After a month of coding, you have the website ready but how to share it ? Can't just tell your friend to clone the repo and run npm run dev. You googled and found out what deployment is. Made an account on Vercel and deployed your first project. Whatsapp your friends the link - coolwebsite.vercel.app.

You amazed your friends with the banger that you created all by your own.

"All by myself" - can't say this anymore.

This ChatGPT is cool

OpenAI just released ChatGPT and the world goes mental about it. Everyone is using it for suggestions, recipes, workout and especially coding. You just started to learn NextJS and don't understand why is framer motion not working. You pasted your code and asked ChatGPT, it said that you need a "use client" for client side rendering.

This simply fascinated you. You started to ask it every doubt you had while coding and enjoyed the process as you are learning things quickly. After a few months, new GPT models released, new AI companies started and AI is the buzz now.

You are still minding your own shit, learning and building stuff. Suddenly, Cursor dropped and it brought a storm with it, AI in editor - tab completion, chat in IDE, agent mode. You being you, not able to buy cursor but saw YT vids on it and thought, "Man, I want something like this".

Not able to buy an AI IDE, you started to use ChatGPT a lot. Making UIs with it, pasting the code of the whole api because a function is throwing some error. This happens for a while and another boom. AI is free now (with limits) - Github Copilot, Claude(context from github), Google giving api keys for free.

Rise of Vibe Coding

Installed Copilot on VSC, switched to agent mode and saw how magical it was. Just prompt what you want and it will be ready in a few seconds. Not only people, most the of devs - just started to learn, amateurs, even devs in big companies - all started to use the agents to do their work.

Prompting and waiting for the agent to complete the task came to be known as vibe coding.

Now, when you start making something, you explain the AI your idea and tell it to create a plan on it. After a plan is created, you tell to start working on it, reviewing what it generated because you are not trusting it fully yet.

Currently, we have non IDE agents and TUI agents like Claude Code, Opencode, Codex, etc. which doesn't even have a code editor. It's sole purpose is to just do what the prompt said. With this, the you don't even see the code, directly see the output and tell the AI to make changes accordingly.

With the current process, you have became a 100x developer but lost the joy of creating something. You created tons of websites and app in languages and frameworks you haven't even used yet, but don't get "that" feeling when you see it working.

Conclusion

This is a story of how a great dev has now became a vibe coder who prompts and doom scrolls.