et me tell you about my friend, Priya.
Priya is one of the sharpest people I know. She can look at a broken business process and immediately see three ways to fix it. She designed her company’s entire onboarding workflow on a napkin once, during lunch. She’s exactly the kind of person you want building software.
For three years, she tried to learn coding the traditional way. Three. Years. Variables, loops, data types, and a Python textbook that smelled like someone else’s anxiety. She dropped off every single time, somewhere around week four, when the tutorials stopped being about building things and started being about memorizing the difference between a list and a tuple. By the way, a husband’s shopping cart is a list — items keep getting added, removed, and changed. A wife’s shopping cart is a tuple — once finalized, there’s no editing allowed.
Last Year, she built and shipped her first real app in eleven days using AI tools. It’s not perfect. But it works, her users love it, and Priya finally stopped prefacing every tech conversation with “I’m not really a developer, but…”
Something has quietly shifted. And if you haven’t noticed it yet, you will soon.
The Myth of the “Real” Developer (And the People Who Needed It to Stay a Myth)
For years, there was an unspoken hierarchy in tech. Real developers wrote raw code — preferably in a dark room, with seven browser tabs open, subsisting on cold coffee and the quiet superiority of knowing what a pointer is. Everyone else was just clicking buttons.
This gatekeeping wasn’t entirely cynical. Some of it came from genuine pride in a craft that took years to learn. But a lot of it, if we’re honest, was also just some people protecting a moat.
The moat held for a long time. And it kept millions of talented, creative, analytically-minded people — people exactly like Priya — from ever trying to build something digital, because the cost of entry felt like signing up for a four-year degree you didn’t have time for.
Here’s the thing, though. Coding was never really about syntax. Syntax was always just the translation layer — the clunky interface between human thinking and machine execution. The actual skill was always: can you decompose a problem clearly? Can you think in systems? Can you describe, precisely, what you want to happen?
AI didn’t change what good engineering requires. It just removed the part where you had to memorize 3,000 method names before you could start.
Enter Vibe Coding — No, Really, That’s What It’s Called
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