The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.
The market isn’t perfect at matching needs and abilities. We famously have a shortage of COBOL programmers, which is crazy given how much of our infrastructure still depends on it. A Nobel prize winner predicted that radiogists would be obsolete eight years ago, and we’ve been suffering a shortage ever since because people believed him and stopped studying it.
The most interesting argument I’ve heard is that vibe coding is to coding, what baby formula was to breastfeeding. When formula was introduced, it took only one generation for us to lose a lot of the generational wisdom and cultural infrastructure surrounding nursing.
We haven’t completely forgotten COBOL, or radiology, or breastfeeding, and technically speaking, we won’t completely forget coding, either. But we might forget enough that it becomes a huge problem when we need to remember.
The market isn’t perfect at matching needs and abilities. We famously have a shortage of COBOL programmers, which is crazy given how much of our infrastructure still depends on it. A Nobel prize winner predicted that radiogists would be obsolete eight years ago, and we’ve been suffering a shortage ever since because people believed him and stopped studying it.
The most interesting argument I’ve heard is that vibe coding is to coding, what baby formula was to breastfeeding. When formula was introduced, it took only one generation for us to lose a lot of the generational wisdom and cultural infrastructure surrounding nursing.
We haven’t completely forgotten COBOL, or radiology, or breastfeeding, and technically speaking, we won’t completely forget coding, either. But we might forget enough that it becomes a huge problem when we need to remember.