I disagree. I’ve had almost 20 years of professional programming experience. Spent a decade in FAANG, the rest in startups.

It is unarguable that I am able to program. Vibe coding has absolutely made programming more accessible to me too.

I have two kids and a full time job. Before LLMs I didn’t do side projects; work and parenting plus my other interests took > 100% of my energy.

Now I have many things I’ve worked on or built solely because LLMs lowered the barrier to entry, and I feel that I can fit the remaining human work into the cracks of the time and energy I do have. One can gripe about how I’m less connected to the code, or that I learned fewer substantial technical lessons from the experience; these things are true.

However, I learned more than if I hadn’t done the project at all. It’s like the exercise benefit of an electric bike - you don’t get the aerobic benefit of an unassisted bike, but if it motivates you to ride when you otherwise wouldn’t then the trade off isn’t so clear.

I'm sure certain people accustomed to hand assembly were saying this when compilers emerged on the scene.

You could use this exact same argument about any discipline and/or tool that has been made to support that discipline. A part of me loathes to make the comparison, but is an "audio engineer" any less of a musician than a traditional pianist? Maybe? It probably depends, but music has been made more accessible by the introduction of digital tools.

Regardless of whether or not AI is generally positive or negative, it's just not a compelling argument on it's face.

We've had this discussion back when high-level languages started becoming popular. Do the unwashed masses deserve to be programming a computer when they don't have a love and appreciation for assembly, or even the underlying ISA and its instruction encoding? And before that: How dare these whippersnappers just hand in their punched cards when they don't even know how to bit bang the boot sequence of the very computer executing them?

It's not even limited to a given occupation. Many hams were outraged about the FCC handing out amateur radio licenses without ANY demonstrated proficiency in morse!

Fortunately, at least in technology, nobody cares what these gatekeepers say. I guess that's an upside of software engineering never having graduated to be "actual engineering" (i.e. one with certifications and personal liability).

Nobody is preventing anyone from going as deep as they want to, and I expect that going one layer (or ten) deeper in understanding than your peers will still pay off even in a post-AI world. The nice thing is that now, nobody has to to just try something. (And you can ask the same system building these things for you how they work!)