My LinkedIn feed is currently drowning in posts from "ex-non-technical" founders. You know the ones. They claim they built a SaaS in a weekend using nothing but Cursor and a dream. They say, "Coding is dead. English is the new programming language."
And for a split second, I believe them.
Then I look at the actual code they are shipping.
We are being sold a story that AI is the great equalizer. The narrative is that the barrier to entry has dropped to zero, and now anyone with a keyboard is a software engineer. But I actually think the opposite is happening.
Vibe coding isn't closing the digital divide. It is creating a much scarier one.
The "Hello World" Mirage
Here is the thing about coding that tutorials never tell you: writing the code is actually the easy part.
If you ask an LLM to "build me a To-Do list app in React," it will do it. It will give you the component. It will give you the CSS. It looks great. The non-developer feels like a wizard.
But then they try to run npm install.
Suddenly, they see a wall of red text. Something about peer dependency conflicts or a deprecated warning from a library the AI chose because its training data is six months old.
This is the new divide.
On one side, you have people who know how to read that error message, update the package.json, and move on. On the other side, you have the "Vibe Coders" who are now completely stuck. They paste the error back into the AI. The AI apologizes and gives them a different wrong solution. They go in circles for four hours.
Access to code generation is not the same thing as access to engineering.
The "Passenger" Problem
I like to think of it like self-driving cars.
Vibe coding puts you in the driver's seat of a Tesla on Autopilot. It feels amazing. You are going 70 mph on the highway, listening to a podcast, barely touching the wheel. You feel like a driver.
But what happens when the car suddenly swerves because it saw a ghost cone? Or when a tire blows out?
If you don't know how to drive manually, you aren't a driver. You are a passenger who happens to be sitting in the front seat.
The danger for these new "AI developers" is that they are building complex systems they do not understand. They are passengers in their own products. When a customer reports a bug, the Vibe Coder is helpless. They can't fix it because they never built it. They just asked for it.
The New Skill: Developing a "Lie Detector" for Code
So, does this mean "normal people" can't become developers via AI?
No, they absolutely can. But the path isn't just "typing prompts." The path is learning to audit what comes back.
The most valuable skill for a junior developer right now isn't memorizing syntax. It is Logic Verification.
I watched a junior dev use AI to write a regex for validating emails last week. The AI gave him a regex. It looked fancy. He pasted it in.
I asked him, "Does that regex allow a plus sign for email aliases? Like name+tag@gmail.com?"
He didn't know. He hadn't checked. He trusted the vibe!
Real development is now about looking at the AI's output and saying, "Nice try, but that is going to cause a memory leak." It is about having the foundational knowledge to know when the AI is hallucinating.
The Verdict
Vibe coding is an incredible entry point. It is like training wheels. It lets you feel the wind in your hair before you know how to balance.
But if we tell people that the training wheels are the bike, we are setting them up for a nasty crash.
The market doesn't pay you for the code you write when everything is going right. The market pays you for the code you fix when everything goes wrong. And unfortunately for the vibe coders, you can't prompt your way out of a system outage.
Top comments (0)