Introduction#
Do you believe that a non-engineer can “vibe code” a production-ready application? This is the question I’ve been reflecting on lately.
The AI landscape is moving so fast, and we are seeing so many cool tools being released almost every day, so it’s natural that many people are getting scared and are starting to “predict” the end of the software engineering career. Look at Jules for example, an AI agent that can automate many typical engineer tasks like updating dependencies, writing documentation, refactoring and even testing.
If those are the only things you are adding to the table as an engineer, maybe yes, you should be scared. But fear is not necessarily a bad thing, it makes us move out of the comfort zone, it allows us to take risks where otherwise we wouldn’t. A good amount of fear drives self-development and innovation.
What Is an Engineer, Anyway?#
I might not be the best person to answer this question because even though I studied Electrical Engineering in college I actually never graduated. Nevertheless, I can say that even without a diploma, the period of time that I spent on the course was foundational to shape my mindset when approching problems in my career.
One of the key moments that influenced me was a masterclass with Dr. Ewaldo Mehl (UFPR) discussing the engineering career to our class of freshman students. Among many brilliant remarks, one that stuck with me until now - more than 20 years later - was about the nature of the work we do… He said something along the lines of, “Engineers are the professionals closest to gods (…) because we don’t just fix things, we create them.”
Yes, I know this comment out of context might sound weird, but the whole point of the conversation was related to the “God complex” that some careers like Medicine often struggle with, and my professor was making fun out of it by saying that engineers should not feel inferior to physicians because we are actually the ones who should have this complex. (Please keep the comments tidy, this was early 2000’s so we were too close to the 90’s :-)
It is a common saying from where I came from that at the bottom of every joke there is a bit of truth, so setting things aside I think that Dr. Mehl was into something… Stripping away all the tooling, at our core, we are creators. The way we create evolves. It used to be with our bare hands and raw materials. Then came tools, computers, and robots. Now, we’re entering the age of AI.
So whenever you think about the engineering career - and whether is it going to die or not - think about the human need to create new things. We will always be iterating, improving and innovating. This is such a fundamental characteristic of human nature that I cannot believe it is going to go away, be it in the next 5 years or in the next millenium.
But the way we create and improve things, that yes, I believe it is going to change.
Orchestrating, Not Just Coding#
I think that the AI revolution will free us from the boring parts to focus on the most exciting aspect of our work: architecture, design, planning and testing the solutions.
I’m not saying that coding itself is boring. Actually, quite the opposite, like most engineers I enjoy coding quite a lot. But maintaing professional code is different than writing code for fun. There are so many things that you will write that doesn’t entirely translate to the things you want to achieve.
Think about all the non-functionals, like for example security, logging, metrics and networking; the hours spent setting up, deploying, testing and validating; all the setup steps to integrate different application layers, databases and so on… A lot of the things that we do on the day to day basis is just to “make it work”, as opposite to actually solving a business problem.
Even simple tasks, like setting up this blog, still took me a few days of work to do - I had to setup my development environment, research what is the best tool foor blogging in 2025, research hosting options, research the domain language used to describe blogs in my chosen platform (e.g. how Hugo sites are organised), test a few templates before selecting one, research how to add comments to the posts… and so on.
How does all of this relates to the business problem I want to solve? They are important steps, but I’ve only done them because they are steps required to “make it work”, and not really what I wanted to achieve in the first place.
What I actually want to create a source of truth that I can use to publish blog posts and then later broadcast them to different platforms for better reach (e.g. Medium, LinkedIn, etc.). I still haven’t been able to solve this business problem because I had to focus on all aspects of the development pipeline of a new app, from inception to production.
How great it would be if we could abstract all of that and just ask an AI to “generate a blog platform for me, batteries included”?
This is where AI is going to quickly become very powerful. With the birth of Agentic AI, we will soon have thousands of agents at our disposal to orchestrate all steps of the software development process, leaving us with the main task of ideation of new experiences, and the “operationalisation” of that will be responsibility of the agents. They will code, deploy and iterate. They will do the research for us and give us options, so we can pick and choose according to our ideals.
It might be hard for you to imagine how this would work without a concrete example, but that’s why I love science fiction as it allows us to have a peek at the future. Think about Star Trek’s computer… I believe that in a few years we will be interacting with the computer in the same way Geordy La Forge does in this scene - the engineering process becomes a dialogue more than an one sided effort on an engineer.
Are we there yet? Not really, but Agentic AI is the next step towards making the future depicted in Star Trek reality. It is definitely starting to feel like AI is bigger than the internet, and as developers we should be making the effort to update ourselves to the “next generation” (pun intented).
So, Can Anyone “Vibe Code”?#
Maybe not anyone, but the barrier to entry is definitely getting lower. The core skills are evolving, but the engineer’s role of creating and architecting is still here and will be here for a long time.
What do you think? Can you see yourself as a more “hands-off” engineer, guiding AI to bring your visions to life? Let’s discuss in the comments!