Everyone keeps saying “coding is dead” because of vibe coding. But I think we are just entering the “Smartphone Era” of development Think about photography. Smartphones didn’t kill professional cameras, they just made “good enough” accessible to everyone. Even professional photographers use their iPhones every day to take quick pictures of documents or their pets because it’s incredibly convenient. But when they are hired for a high-end gig, they pull out the DSLR because they need total control The exact same thing applies to scale. If you are shooting a quick vlog, a smartphone is perfect. But if Marvel is shooting the next Avengers movie, they aren’t going to film it on an iPhone. They need massive, dedicated cinema cameras for ultimate reliability This is exactly what is happening in tech right now: Vibe coding is the smartphone. It’s perfect for the “vloggers” of tech (prototypes, simple apps, internal tools) Traditional coding is the cinema camera. You still need it for the “Marvel movies” of tech (think banking websites/apps, complex architecture) because AI currently struggles with big-picture systems and just brute-forces messy code The problem right now is the marketing. AI companies are giving us the software equivalent of those Apple “Shot on iPhone” commercials. Yes, the camera was technically an iPhone… but they don’t show you the $50,000 professional cinema rig it was strapped to or the Hollywood lighting crew, or the master colorist behind the scenes. AI companies are doing the exact same thing by hiding the senior engineers who are manually fine-tuning prompts and untangling the code to make these demos work So how should we actually look at vibe coding? Think of it like an Uber driver. You aren’t physically pressing the gas pedal or steering the wheel anymore but you must know your exact starting point and your final destination. If the AI takes a wrong turn or starts hallucinating bad logic, you need to have enough coding knowledge to tap it on the shoulder and direct it back to the right path I made a video breaking down this whole analogy, MKBHD’s take on computational photography and why I think learning to code isn’t dead, it’s just evolving into directing the machine. Would love to hear what you guys think. Video link: https://youtu.be/7CtYToAYpWE submitted by /u/androbada525
Originally posted by u/androbada525 on r/ClaudeCode
You must log in or # to comment.