For years, the industry has been trying to sell people on the idea that the machine can do all the work, and humans can just tune out.
For years, we’ve all seen that isn’t really true... yet.
And it’s increasingly difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that people are still complaining about code quality from LLMs.
We really should have passed this point sometime around April.
The tell is in what’s being said, and by whom.
My feeling is that this is mostly an orchestration problem now, rather than errors and omissions baked into the machine.
Orchestration is a relatively new discipline.
Nobody was trained for it.
The whole thing has less to do with taste than it does with being able to clearly explain your own process to a machine without burying it in logic trees: how you investigate a problem, how you break it apart, your personal definition of good or done.
The failure mode, sadly, is still very human.
That’s why it's so interesting to watch this unfold in the wild as senior developers learn how to work this way.
It's counterintuitive, but after seeing enough of it, you begin to understand that being a fantastic developer using the old process does not necessarily mean you’ll be good at orchestration on your own.
But then again, it might.
Like I said, personal process is everything.
And that makes me think of the kids. The next generation, the totally AI native one that's coming now.
Some of them are extraordinary orchestrators, even if they have almost no conventional engineering skills yet. They're like this beautiful little army of self taught generalists, doing things that are so much more ambitious than they should be.
I love the earnest sense of exploration and creativity that radiates off them. They don’t have twenty years of habits telling them what software development is supposed to look like.
They talked to the machine, built something weird, and let their imaginations run wild.
I feel like, as we got older and more cynical, we forgot that software engineering is supposed to be an artform.
But vibe coders get it.
If you ever get a chance to spend some time with them, you should.
They’re gonna do big things.