Four things to think about if you are a developer, an aspiring developer, or a vibe coder in the age of artificial intelligence.
1. The software market is about to get much bigger
The first point is that the software market, the entire ecosystem, is about to become far larger than the one we know. Orders of magnitude larger. There is potentially going to be a lot more software soon, and why?
First of all, because people who have never written code can now build programs. So there is this decoupling: until now, to create a program you had to be a developer, and that is no longer the case. So you can make much more software, because there are many more people writing it.
Second, since the cost of creating programs drops dramatically, people will build software that would never have been written for cost reasons. There is a flood of software you can now make that would never have been done professionally, done properly, because it would have cost too much. Now instead you can create software you use only once, software that runs on a single computer, software built to be used within a family.
And not only that: the software market grows substantially because the pool of automatable things grows. With language models, with agents, thanks to the machine’s use of language, automations become possible on things that previously would not have been remotely considered feasible. So the sheer quantity of things you can do gets bigger, the number of people with ideas about what to do grows, and the cost of doing it drops. Software is eating the world, as people have been saying for decades, and all the more so with artificial intelligence.
2. Look at software in a more differentiated way
The second point is to look at software, at the practice of software, in a more differentiated way than the binary takes you find online. “No, it replaces all of us.” “No, pure hardcore software survives.” There is a whole spectrum of different ways to write programs, from pure vibe coding through all the intermediate lines up to spec-driven development, where you know perfectly well how to write code, you know the architecture, and you lean on AI agents to which you delegate parts of the code in an extremely structured way. And there is still room for whoever wants to hand-write all of it. Why not? Do whatever you like. The important thing is to look at the various modes of development, because they have multiplied, they have become more nuanced, and there are more professional roles involved than before.
3. Differentiate your thinking
The third point, which sort of sums up the previous two, is to differentiate your observations, differentiate your reasoning: to attack a niche where you are better, to understand more clearly what is happening, to see the landscape, to figure out in advance how to move, what to train on, and what to drop because it is no longer useful. We have to start seeing the nuances in what is happening.
And I insist on this point because the conversation is polarized, linear, simplistic, obtuse. I see very few people who actually get into the substance of understanding what is going on and start seeing the categories, the possibilities, the strategies, and even the specializations inside it. Enough with the binary talk.
4. Take the slice of ham off your eyes
Fourth point, this one aimed in particular at those who, legitimately, are still resisting. I believe this resistance is driven more by emotional issues than rational ones. Part of it is a phase of denial in the face of a trauma: seeing yourself questioned in what you have been doing for 10, 15, 20 years.
So the fourth point is: take the slice of ham off your eyes. And this one anticipates all the previous points, because if you peel the slice of prosciutto off your eyes, maybe you start seeing all these nuances we are talking about. Drop the “no, this is garbage, this stuff is trash” attitude, because then I read “yeah but enterprise software has to be done properly.” Sure, fine, but if you do not start using these tools, if you do not start caring about how much and how they are entering your work, then you are the fool. You are wrapping your own head in bandages, isolating yourself from something that is happening anyway. And meanwhile here come the others, the ones who not only took off that slice of ham, but got genuinely fired up, because they started actively taking part in rethinking their own ways of working.
Take the slice of ham off your eyes.
