AI makes writing code cheaper. It makes understanding code more valuable.
The bottleneck is shifting from “Can you produce this code?” to “Can you tell whether this code is actually good?”
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Saw a funny meme:
I code, you review: $500
You vibe-code, I review: $5,000
Vibe coding makes building software cheaper, but maintaining badly built software can cost you far more.
Kent Beck said he wasn’t a great programmer, just a good one with great habits. The habits are the part the models never picked up. They will write you the code, but nothing in them wants to write the test first, or pair on the hard bit, or stop and refactor while it’s still green.
The problem with the app AI built you over a weekend isn’t the code. It’s that when it breaks on a Saturday, there is exactly one person who can go and look at it, and it’s you.
It built exactly what was asked for. Nobody asked for backups, so there aren’t any. The AI wasn’t being careless. It was being obedient, which is the harder problem to spot.
Four hundred lines land in a pull request and get approved ninety seconds later. Whatever that is, it isn’t review.