I feel like they kind of lost the thread here, even though I think I agree with the idea that vibe coding is a fundamentally different thing than another layer of abstraction. There's no need to punch on the web developers. We've all known, for the last several decades at least, that we don't have to understand the entire mechanism completely. No one is out there doping their own silicon and writing JS apps to run on it. The whole point of layered abstractions is that you can build on a set of assumptions without having to know all the implementation details of the layers below. When an abstraction leaks, then it can be useful to have some facility with the lower levels, but no person alive is a master of the full stack. The beautiful thing about abstractions is that you don't have to be. That's still true with vibe coding, just with the extra complexity of having a ticker tape spitting out semi-coherent code faster than any human could type it, which moves the dev from a creative role to more of an administrative one, as they mention earlier in the piece, which 1) is not nearly as fun, and crucially 2) doesn't help you build the muscles that make one good at code administration.
I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now and the Thing I Loved Has Changed
(www.jamesdrandall.com)
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