Not only you're making huge assumptions on AI's ability to build software useable by non-software engineers without professional input, you're also underestimating people's desire to pay just for convenience ("gee, I need a diet tracker, let me find a few people to help me vibe code it instead of paying $10")

Try replicating it with a couple of agents. Not the capabilities, but the performance, stability and dependability and sustainability as well.

Same is true for my favorite text editor on macOS, BBEdit, or IDE of choice, Eclipse. I can increase the number of examples.

These tools are valuable not because they are expensive. They are valuable, or indeed priceless, because of the polish they have. The small features make no sense for a beginner or how they cope when things get absurdly haywire.

Immediate features make us excited and they are easier to replicate because they are visible, but things like performance, dependability, error recovery or the small tweaks they have gone through in the last decade are not, and this is what matters.

We're exploring computing via AI again, and we act that we did nothing in the last 60 years or so. Software and computing is much deeper than it looks at the surface, and we'll learn this in a very very painful way, again.

I’ve seen this claim so many times but I struggle to believe people are running vibe coded software replacements as daily drivers. Certainly not in a professional environment. They are all invariably interesting little projects at best.