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The fact that AI can produce results that range from remarkably impressive to shockingly problematic may explain why developers seem so divided about the technology. WIRED surveyed programmers in March to ask how they felt about AI coding, and found that the proportion who were enthusiastic about AI tools (36 percent) was mirrored by the portion who felt skeptical (38 percent).

“Undoubtedly AI will change the way code is produced,” says Daniel Jackson, a computer scientist at MIT who is currently exploring how to integrate AI into large-scale software development. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if we were in for disappointment—that the hype will pass.”

Jackson cautions that AI models are fundamentally different from the compilers that turn code written in a high-level language into a lower-level language that is more efficient for machines to use, because they don’t always follow instructions. Sometimes an AI model may take an instruction and execute better than the developer—other times it might do the task much worse.

Jackson adds that vibe coding falls down when anyone is building serious software. “There are almost no applications in which ‘mostly works’ is good enough,” he says. “As soon as you care about a piece of software, you care that it works right.”

Many software projects are complex, and changes to one section of code can cause problems elsewhere in the system. Experienced programmers are good at understanding the bigger picture, Jackson says, but “large language models can’t reason their way around those kinds of dependencies.”

Jackson believes that software development might evolve with more modular codebases and fewer dependencies to accommodate AI blind spots. He expects that AI may replace some developers but will also force many more to rethink their approach and focus more on project design.

Too much reliance on AI may be “a bit of an impending disaster,” Jackson adds, because “not only will we have masses of broken code, full of security vulnerabilities, but we’ll have a new generation of programmers incapable of dealing with those vulnerabilities.”

Learn to Code

Even firms that have already integrated coding tools into their software development process say the technology remains far too unreliable for wider use.

Christine Yen, CEO at Honeycomb, a company that provides technology for monitoring the performance of large software systems, says that projects that are simple or formulaic, like building component libraries, are more amenable to using AI. Even so, she says the developers at her company who use AI in their work have only increased their productivity by about 50 percent.

Yen adds that for anything requiring good judgement, where performance is important, or where the resulting code touches sensitive systems or data, “AI just frankly isn’t good enough yet to be additive.”

“The hard part about building software systems isn’t just writing a lot of code,” she says. “Engineers are still going to be necessary, at least today, for owning that curation, judgment, guidance and direction.”

Others suggest that a shift in the workforce is coming. “We are not seeing less demand for developers,” says Liad Elidan, CEO of Milestone, a company that helps firms measure the impact of generative AI projects. “We are seeing less demand for average or low-performing developers.”

“If I’m building a product, I could have needed 50 engineers and now maybe I only need 20 or 30,” says Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks, a company that helps large businesses build their own AI systems. “That is absolutely real.”

Rao says, however, that learning to code should remain a valuable skill for some time. “It’s like saying ‘Don’t teach your kid to learn math,’” he says. Understanding how to get the most out of computers is likely to remain extremely valuable, he adds.

Yegge and Kim, the veteran coders, believe that most developers can adapt to the coming wave. In their book on vibe coding, the pair recommend new strategies for software development including modular code bases, constant testing, and plenty of experimentation. Yegge says that using AI to write software is evolving into its own—slightly risky—art form. “It’s about how to do this without destroying your hard disk and draining your bank account,” he says.

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