Vibe-Coding Yourself into Irrelevance

Claude Code has considerably changed my relationship to writing and maintaining code at scale. I still write code at the same level of quality, but I feel like I have a new freedom of expression which is hard to fully articulate.

Claude Code has decoupled myself from writing every line of code, I still consider myself fully responsible for everything I ship to Puzzmo, but the ability to instantly create a whole scene instead of going line by line, word by word is incredibly powerful.

Oh sweet Summer child.

As a former translator, I can tell you that’s how it starts. As time goes on, your clients or your manager will demand more and more code from you. You will stop checking every line to meet the deadlines. Maybe you just stop checking the boilerplate at first, but it won’t stay that way. As pressure to be more “productive” mounts, you’ll start checking fewer and fewer lines. Before you know it, your client or manager will just give you entire autogenerated swaths of code, and your job will be to just go over it, making sure it kind of works. Before long, you realise there are fewer and fewer of you. Younger and less-skilled “developers” can quickly go over autogenerated code just as well as you do – but they’re way cheaper. You see the quality of the code you sign off on deteriorate rapidly, but you have no time, and not enough pay, to rewrite the autogenerated code. It works, kind of, and that will have to be enough. The autogenerated codebases you’re supposed to be checking and fixing are so large now, you’re no longer even really checking anything anymore. Quick, cursory glances, that’s all you have time for and can afford. Documentation and commenting code went out the window a long time ago, and every line of code scrolling across your screen is more tech debt you don’t care about, because it’s not your code anyway.

And then it hits you.

There’s no skill here. There’s no art here. You’re no longer a programmer. There’s no career prospects. Scrolling past shitty autogenerated code day in, day out, without the time or pay to wrangle it into something to be proud of, is the end of the line for you. Speak up about it, and you’ll be replaced by someone cheaper.

The first time I was given a massive pile of autotranslated text to revise, without enough time and pay to ensure I was delivering a quality product, I quit and left the translation industry instantly. Like programming, translating is part skill, part art, and I didn’t get two university degrees in language and translation just to deliver barely passable trash. I took pride in my work, and I wasn’t going to let anyone put my name under a garbage product.

Programmers, you’re next. Will you have the stones to stand by your art?