Last week someone on r/vibecoding asked a question that's been rattling around my head since:
"The number of vibecoders will surpass actual coders and then what? Do we stop labelling them as vibecoders, as this community becomes the new norm for the word 'coder'? Then what do w
e call the original coders?"
I think this has already happened. 92% of US developers use AI coding tools daily. The vast majority of all new code is AI-generated. When the majority of people writing software are vibing their way through it, "vibe coder" isn't a subculture anymore — it's just "coder."
So what do we call the rest of us?
The Photography Parallel
This exact transition happened before. When DSLRs got auto-mode and smartphones put a camera in every pocket, suddenly everyone was a "photographer." The professionals didn't disappear. They just stopped being called photographers.
They became cinematographers. Retouchers. Visual engineers. The craft got more specific, not extinct. The word "photographer" shifted to mean the casual majority, and the people who understood light, composition, and post-processing found new titles that reflected what they actually did.
The same thing is happening to "coder" right now.
## The 80/20 Wall
I've been vibe coding side projects for a while now. The pattern is always the same:
The AI gets you to 80% in 10 minutes. It generates a full working app, sets up infrastructure, writes the CSS, handles the boilerplate. It's genuinely magical.
Then you hit the wall.
The CSS silently overrides a third-party library's display property. The setInterval works perfectly in the foreground but gets throttled to once per minute in a background tab. An AWS CLI flag used twice doesn't error — it silently overwrites the first value. The AI generates code that looks right but breaks in ways that require you to actually understand what the
code does, not just what it says.
That last 20% is where the craft lives now. And I'd argue it's the harder 20%.
The 2am Test
Here's the dividing line I keep coming back to:
A vibe coder builds it. A RelEng keeps it running.
RelEng — short for Reliability Engineer. Not because it's a new concept (Google's been using "SRE" for years), but because it captures exactly what the role becomes when AI handles generation: you're the person responsible for making sure it actually works. In production. At 2am. When the vibed code catches fire.
This isn't about gatekeeping or ego. It's about acknowledging that the skill set is shifting. The valuable part is no longer "can you write a React component?" — the AI does that better a
nd faster. The valuable part is:
- Can you debug it when it breaks in Safari but not Chrome?
- Can you spot that the AI generated plausible but incorrect error handling?
- Can you figure out why the infrastructure is returning 403s on a perfectly valid bucket policy?
- Can you make it survive 10,000 concurrent users when it was vibed for 10?
That's reliability engineering. That's the craft that doesn't get automated away when the generation becomes effortless.
The New Stack
If I'm right about this, the job market is heading toward a split:
| Role | What they do | How they work |
|---|---|---|
| Coder (the new default) | Builds features, ships MVPs, creates products | Prompts AI, iterates fast, ships often |
| RelEng | Debugs, hardens, scales, fixes the 20% | Reads generated code, understands systems, owns reliability |
Both are valuable. Both are necessary. But they're increasingly different skill sets. A great vibe coder has taste, product sense, and speed. A great RelEng has systems knowledge, debugging instinct, and patience.
The overlap exists but it's shrinking.
Why This Matters
It matters because naming things shapes careers. Right now, if you're a traditional developer who actually understands systems, memory management, browser quirks, and distributed systems
— you don't have a word that distinguishes what you do from someone who shipped a full-stack app in an afternoon by prompting Claude.
You're both called "developers." But you're doing fundamentally different things.
RelEng gives us that word. It says: I don't just generate code. I make sure it works. I'm the person you call at 2am when the vibed code catches fire.
And honestly? That's where the money is anyway.
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