Vibe Coding: Creativity Transformed into an Assembly Line

Introduction

In the last few months, I've begun to think about how AI made its way into my work life and how it completely changed the way we build software. I started working as a developer because it always fascinated me how, by simply writing lines on a screen, I could create something beautiful to look at. In these years AI has become part of our daily lives. In this article, I want to look at how it changed the software development landscape, for the better and for the worse.

AI Is Fast But It Doesn't Think

AI in software development has become an essential part of the job. The market demands fast delivery for every feature, and AI gives exactly that. Before, developers had to think about how to structure a feature, plan it in detail, and then write the code at the speed of their fingers then deal with errors, debugging, tests, and everything else. Now AI does all of that at an inhuman speed; a human just can't keep up.

Maybe they haven't reached human-level reasoning yet, but they're getting closer each day. I know these LLMs aren't really thinking and are just a fancy math model that predicts the best possible next word, one token after the other but still, they're fast. Really fast.

That said, they still require a human to control and manage them. On their own, even if you make them review their own output, they make some of the worst decisions imaginable. They don't think. They don't know what the best option for your use case is, or what you actually want to create.

The True Cost

So AI is really fast at writing code, that's why the entire industry is using it. But what is the true cost? Apart from the price of tokens, which for large models can be very steep, the cost is also the creativity and soul of the developers who are expected to use them. Because we're essentially transforming a creative job that being software development into a soulless factory assembly line.

I've Seen This Before

I say that because I know what an assembly line feels like. During my school years, I had the chance to work in a PCB manufacturing plant for what we call in Italy alternanza scuola-lavoro. I was put on one of the assembly lines, and the job was pretty simple: take the PCB, put it into the machine, wait for the machine to do the work, inspect the result, pass it onto another machine for a second inspection, and repeat.

This is the most soulless kind of job someone can do. I have full respect for everybody who does it, but I'd rather die than fry my brain doing this every work day of my life for 40+ years.

That experience made me understand that I never wanted to work a job like that, and it's one of the reasons I appreciated software development even more. It was not an assembly line. I could think of a solution, write it, test it, see it work or not, make it better, and everything in between. Every time it was a different problem, a different solution; it was stimulating for my mind and for my soul.

The New Assembly Line

Enter the AI software development era. What I dreaded during my time in that PCB factory became a reality in my development journey. I don't know if the experience is different in other startups or companies, but my job lately has essentially become a software assembly line:

1. I write a prompt
2. I wait for the AI to do the job
3. I inspect the result
4. I discard it or refine the prompt until it gets me what I want
5. Repeat

Everything I loved about software development gone, just like that. I don't have an answer yet. Is this just the growing pains of a new era, or are we actually losing something we won't get back?