"Over the holidays, some strange signals started emanating from the pulsating, energetic blob of X users who set the agenda in AI. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who coined the term "vibe coding," but had recently minimized AI programming as helpful but unremarkable "slop," was suddenly talking about how he'd "never felt this much behind as a programmer," and tweeting in wonder about feeling like he was using a "powerful alien tool.""
"Others users traded it's so overs and we're so backs, wondering aloud if software engineering had just been "solved" or was "done," as recently anticipated by some industry leaders. An engineer at Google wrote of a competitor's tool, "I'm not joking and this isn't funny," describing how it replicated a year of her team's work "in an hour." She was talking about Claude Code. Everyone was."
AI coding tools have driven a rapid, uneven shift in how software gets made, with programming adoption outpacing other workplace AI uses. Influential community reactions ranged from awe to alarm, including descriptions of feeling behind and likening tools to powerful alien assistants. Some observers questioned whether software engineering had been effectively "solved" after tools replicated large bodies of work in hours. Large language models and coding assistants moved many routine tasks into plain-English workflows, prompting a new focus on agent-based orchestration, developer-tool alignment, and rethinking productivity, hiring, and engineering processes.
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