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 companyâs entire onboarding workflow on a napkin once, during lunch. Sheâs 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 elseâs 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 husbandâs shopping cart is a list â items keep getting added, removed, and changed. A wifeâs shopping cart is a tuple â once finalized, thereâs no editing allowed.
Last Year, she built and shipped her first real app in eleven days using AI tools. Itâs not perfect. But it works, her users love it, and Priya finally stopped prefacing every tech conversation with âIâm not really a developer, butâŚâ
Something has quietly shifted. And if you havenât noticed it yet, you will soon.
The Myth of the âRealâ 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 â 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 wasnât entirely cynical. Some of it came from genuine pride in a craft that took years to learn. But a lot of it, if weâre 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 â people exactly like Priya â from ever trying to build something digital, because the cost of entry felt like signing up for a four-year degree you didnât have time for.
Hereâs the thing, though. Coding was never really about syntax. Syntax was always just the translation layer â 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 didnât 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 â No, Really, Thatâs What Itâs Called