The future of computer programming is here, and it’s fun.

Paul Ford, The A.I. Disruption Is Actually Here, and It’s Not Terrible, NYTimes, Feb. 18, 2026.

Vibe coding:

To vibe code is to make software with prompts sent to a specialized chatbot — not coding, but telling — and letting the bot work out the bugs. Like many other programmers, I use a product called Claude Code from Anthropic, although Codex from OpenAI does about as well, and Google Gemini is not far behind. Claude Code earned $1 billion for Anthropic in its first six months. It was always a helpful coding assistant, but in November it suddenly got much better, and ever since I’ve been knocking off side projects that had sat in folders for a decade or longer. It’s fun to see old ideas come to life, so I keep a steady flow. Maybe it adds up to a half-hour a day of my time, and an hour of Claude’s.

November was, for me and many others in tech, a great surprise. Before, A.I. coding tools were often useful, but halting and clumsy. Now, the bot can run for a full hour and make whole, designed websites and apps that may be flawed, but credible. I spent an entire session of therapy talking about it.

The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves?

It’s by no means perfect:

Is the software I’m making for myself on my phone as good as handcrafted, bespoke code? No. But it’s immediate and cheap. And the quantities, measured in lines of text, are large. It might fail a company’s quality test, but it would meet every deadline. That is what makes A.I. coding such a shock to the system.

An axiom of programming is “real artists ship.” That was something Steve Jobs once said to remind his team that finishing and releasing a product matters more than endlessly refining it. Much of the software industry is organized around managing ship risk, and the possibility that a product never actually makes it out to the world. good technology manager assumes that a product will never ship for launch, that every force is arrayed against it, and that the devil himself has cursed it — and then the manager works back from that. Even if all these obstacles are surmounted, the software will ship late.

Having worked in the software industry for a few years, though not as a programmer, I’m well aware of this. See this post from the two years I spent at MapInfo: Crisis in a High-Tech Start-Up: A Case of Collective Action. Now, back to Ford’s article:

Except … what if, going forward, it’s not? What if software suddenly wanted to ship? What if all of that immense bureaucracy, the endless processes, the mind-boggling range of costs that you need to make the computer compute, just goes poof? That doesn’t mean that the software will be good. But most software today is not good. It simply means that products could go to market very quickly.

And for lots of users, that’s going to be fine. People don’t judge A.I. code the same way they judge slop articles or glazed videos. They’re not looking for the human connection of art. They’re looking to achieve a goal. Code just has to work.

There are many arguments against vibe coding through A.I. [...] All of these are true and valid. But I’ve been around too long. The web wasn’t “real” software until it was. Blogging wasn’t publishing. Big, serious companies weren’t going to migrate to the cloud, and then one day they did.

But right now, excited developers are overextending themselves to the point of burnout, obsessively coding all the time. [...] People trumpet the Jevons paradox, which points out that greater efficiency often leads to more consumption — but at the same time, would it surprise you to find out tomorrow that large technology consulting firms had just laid off 10,000 people? A hundred thousand? A million?

The market keeps convulsing, and I wish we could hit the brakes. But we live in a brakeless era.

No matter where you work, my hunch is this is coming for you.

It’s unavoidable, Ford says:

This is all exacerbated by how much of the A.I. industry is led by people who see human thought as raw material, like a steel manufacturer sees ore. The industry is arranged into an ouroboros of mutual investments, with the world economy teetering on their sweetest dreams. Social change at this level needs careful, federal governance and thoughtful regulation. But we’re being handed the opposite: Racist A.I. video slop shared on Truth Social, Grok doing who-knows-what inside the Pentagon, and a White House policy that would give the U.S. attorney general the power to challenge any state’s attempt to regulate A.I. No brakes.

All of the people I love hate this stuff, and all the people I hate love it. And yet, likely because of the same personality flaws that drew me to technology in the first place, I am annoyingly excited. [...]

I believe there are millions, maybe billions, of software products that don’t exist but should: Dashboards, reports, apps, project trackers and countless others. People want these things to do their jobs, or to help others, but they can’t find the budget. They make do with spreadsheets and to-do lists.

My industry is famous for saying “no,” or selling you something you don’t need. We have an earned reputation as a lot of really tiresome dudes. But I think if vibe coding gets a little bit better, a little more accessible and a little more reliable, people won’t have to wait on us. They can just watch some how-to videos and learn, and then they can have the power of these tools for themselves. [...]

The simple truth is that I am less valuable than I used to be. It stings to be made obsolete, but it’s fun to code on the train, too. And if this technology keeps improving, then everyone who tells me how hard it is to make a report, place an order, upgrade an app or update a record — they could get the software they deserve, too. That might be a good trade, long term.