Over on the Fediverse, I said something about this:

Hot take: I don't really know what vibe coding is but I can confidently predict that it's 'coming for', if not your job, then definitely the jobs of the people who work in internal development at medium to large non-tech companies. I can predict this because management at such companies has *always* wanted to get rid of programmers, and has consistently seized on every excuse presented by the industry to do so. COBOL, report generators, rule based systems, etc etc etc at length.

(The story I heard is that at one point COBOL's English language basis was at least said to enable non-programmers to understand COBOL programs and maybe even write them, and this was seen as a feature by organizations adopting it.)

The current LLM craze is also coming for the jobs of system administrators for the same reason; we're overhead, just like internal development at (most) non-tech companies. In most non-tech organizations, both internal development and system administration is something similar to janitorial services; you have to have it because otherwise your organization falls over, but you don't like it and you're happy to spend as little on it as possible. And, unfortunately, we have a long history in technology that shows the long term results don't matter for the people making short term decisions about how many people to hire and who.

(Are they eating their seed corn? Well, they probably don't think it matters to them, and anyway that's a collective problem, which 'the market' is generally bad at solving.)

As I sort of suggested by using 'excuse' in my Fediverse post, it doesn't really matter if LLMs truly work, especially if they work over the long run. All they need to do in order to get senior management enthused about 'cutting costs' is appear to work well enough over the short term, and appearing to work is not necessarily a matter of substance. In sort of a flipside of how part of computer security is convincing people, sometimes it's enough to simply convince (senior) people and not have obvious failures.

(I have other thoughts about the LLM craze and 'vibe coding', as I understand it, but they don't fit within the margins of this entry.)

PS: I know it's picky of me to call this an 'LLM craze' instead of an 'AI craze', but I feel I have to both as someone who works in a computer science department that does all sorts of AI research beyond LLMs and as someone who was around for a much, much earlier 'AI' craze (that wasn't all of AI either, cf).