I love being able to quickly bring out the program that is already running in my head without having to worry about the grind of typing it into a format that the compiler understands. Dealing with API names. Syntax. Language quirks. Library gotchas. A sizeable portion of my successful career as a software engineer was spent on the tiresome process of interacting with a text editor/IDE to get a program to do what I wanted.

I was there when people were still coding assembly. A slow torture where the simplest things took forever to get right.

Once I've mentally solved the problem, the fun is mostly over for me. Pure vibe coding is dull and unsustainable with current technology for all but the simplest systems; AI-assisted coding, on the other hand, rekindled my passion for computers.

"eventually id Tech 5 is going to be open source also. This is still the law of the land at id"[0]

"Great! I think Microsoft has been a good parent company for gaming IPs"[1]

By sheer coincidence, John Carmack is peddling machine generated code.[2]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20081003111457/http://www.linuxg...

[1] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1308069857913720832

[2] https://80.lv/articles/john-carmack-s-agi-startup-keen-techn...

Of course it's possible for it to go off the rails. Consider that a wildly swung sword can do damage you can't do with your bare hands. To prevent this, constrain your model to the solution shape you want by grounding it; give it contact with reality; ways to run the code it's generating and refine it to meet your goals; granular tests; etc.

The new job is in how you wield the tools and it is at least as complex as the old.