The latest articles on DEV Community by ynafey (@nafey). https://dev.to/nafey https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F2692874%2Fa4e53caf-ece0-46db-a698-8ec3de15bc3f.png https://dev.to/nafey en ynafey Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:42:37 +0000 https://dev.to/nafey/is-vibe-coding-similar-to-passive-investment-4p8l https://dev.to/nafey/is-vibe-coding-similar-to-passive-investment-4p8l <p>I have been thinking deeply about what AI means for careers in Software Engineering.</p> <p>We have all seen and built pretty amazing things with AI. Even five years ago these capabilities would have seemed magical but now they are common place and increasingly a part of every developers workflow. </p> <p>What puzzles me is the fact that we have not seen enough disruption compared to seemingly "magical" properties of AI/LLMs. Don't get me wrong I am well aware of the hardships for thousands of laid off engineers and recent grads who can not find a job in the tech industry. But even so, there are millions of people who continue to work as a Software Engineer. </p> <p>The AI is omniscient, works 100s of times faster and costs at least a magnitude less than a single devs salary but is still unable to replace the humble SWEs hammering away at their keyboards.</p> <p>Why is that the case? I think the world of finance provides a great parallel to the AI era in coding.</p> <h1> Passive vs Active Investment </h1> <p>In plain words active investment is when we invest money following a certain strategy and usually picking stocks/bonds manually. Passive investment on the other hand is when instead of choosing stocks/bonds/ETFs individually we put money into a fund that indexes all the available investment opportunities. </p> <p>Because passive investments are well diversified they tend to beat most Actively managed funds. Also generally the management fees are a magnitude lower for the former compared to the latter. And despite that more people are working as fund managers today than the 90s when passive investment first became popular.</p> <h1> Vibe coding vis a vis passive investment </h1> <p>The parallels between the two scenarios are rather striking. You can either choose to coast upon the collected wisdom of the market (or all the code in the training data) and do pretty well. But active strategy as well as actively writing code seems to still hold its own in the wider economy. </p> <p>I guess the reason for the continued existence of the latter is that vibecoding and passive investment generate average results. Say you want to start an e-commerce business vibe-coding will give you the most average website which will be (to quote The Simpsons) perfectly cromulent. But being average may not be enough for an e-commerce website to survive in today's economy. </p> <p>You have to beat the benchmark not be the benchmark. And thus there is a market rationale for a more active strategy where the promise is that the active involvement of the fund manager/software engineer will pay off in higher returns than what the passive benchmark/AI can deliver. </p> <h1> The road ahead </h1> <p>A substantial amount of all funds continue to be actively managed as of today. If this analogy holds in the future we may expect the market to similarly continue to employ software engineers. Only the future will tell how this analogy will play out but I continue to be optimistic for humans to still have a role in software development.</p> programming ai