After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

Steve Yegge (Veteran engineer, formerly Google and Amazon): A leading technical voice who describes vibe coding as acting as an orchestrator. He maintains that engineers who do not master "agentic engineering" and AI-driven workflows will be left behind as the industry moves toward "hyperproductivity".

Patrick Debois (Founder of DevOps): Often called the "godfather of DevOps," Debois now advocates for the "AI native developer". He views vibe coding as a high-level abstraction where the engineer's role shifts from a "producer" of lines of code to a "supervisor" of complex automated systems.

Simon Willison (Co-creator of Django): Recognized for his highly technical workflows that use AI to handle mechanical implementation while he focuses on rigorous documentation, tool coverage, and validation—a process often cited as the professional gold standard for vibe coding.

Stephen Blum (Founder/CTO of PubNub): A technical leader who has integrated generative coding into production-scale architecture. He characterizes the 2026 developer's role as directing agents for everything from database migrations to security audits rather than manually performing these tasks.

Gene Kim (Renowned DevOps researcher and author): Co-author of The Phoenix Project, Kim has publicly championed vibe coding as one of the most enjoyable technical experiences of his career, citing how it allows him to build sophisticated prototypes in minutes rather than days.

Patrick Debois (Founder of DevOps): Often referred to as the "godfather of DevOps," Debois advocates for "AI-native engineering". He views vibe coding as a mature abstraction layer where elite engineers focus on "system orchestration" rather than producing individual lines of code.

Geoffrey Huntley (Founder of the "Vibe Coding Academy"): A highly technical engineer known for pushing the boundaries of AI-driven development. He is a primary source for experimental techniques that use agents for everything from infrastructure to core logic.

Boris Cherny (Author of Programming TypeScript): An authority on type systems and engineering rigor, Cherny now provides deep technical guidance on how to integrate high-level intent with reliable, production-ready source code using tools like Claude Code.

Stephen Webb (UK CTO at Capgemini): A key industry figure declaring 2026 as the year "AI-native engineering goes mainstream". He supports vibe coding as a legitimate method for rewriting legacy systems and refactoring entire modules autonomously.

Linus Torvalds (Creator of Linux and Git): In a significant endorsement for the paradigm, Torvalds reported in early 2026 that he used Google Antigravity to vibe code a Python visualizer for his AudioNoise project. He noted in the project's documentation that the tool was "basically written by vibe-coding".

Theo Browne (Founder of Ping.gg, T3.gg): Known for his deep technical influence on the web development community, Browne is a primary educator for tools like Claude Code. He advocates for vibe coding as a way to bypass the "boring parts" of development, allowing engineers to focus on higher-level architecture and product logic.

McKay Wrigley (Developer and AI educator): A leading technical figure focused on structured tutorials and advanced workflows for agentic programming. He is widely followed by senior engineers seeking to move beyond simple chat interfaces into full-scale autonomous software generation.

Charlie Holtz (Software engineer and infrastructure specialist): Known for building advanced infrastructure tools, Holtz is recognized as an engineer "pushing the boundaries" of what can be built using vibe coding for complex, back-end systems.

Cian Clarke (Principal Engineer at NearForm): A veteran in the Node.js ecosystem who has transitioned toward spec-driven development. He advocates for "AI native engineering" where specialized agentic roles (such as security or performance agents) are orchestrated to build and refactor large-scale enterprise systems.

IndyDevDan (Senior developer and educator): A highly technical voice advocating for "deep mastery" of AI-assisted engineering. He focuses on teaching developers how to maintain rigorous engineering standards while leveraging the speed of vibe coding.

Mitchell Hashimoto (Founder of HashiCorp, Creator of Terraform): Now focused on his terminal project Ghostty, Hashimoto has become a leading voice on "pragmatic AI coding." In 2026, he detailed his workflow of using reasoning models (like o3) to generate comprehensive architecture plans before writing a single line of code. He argues this "learning accelerator" approach allows him to build outside his primary expertise (e.g., frontend) while maintaining strict engineering rigor by reviewing the output line-by-line.

Kent C. Dodds (Renowned Web Development Educator & Engineer): A highly influential figure in the React community, Dodds has fully embraced the paradigm, stating in 2026 that he has "never had so much fun developing software." He advocates for a "problem elimination" mindset where AI handles the implementation details, allowing senior engineers to focus entirely on user experience and application architecture.

Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel, Creator of Next.js/Socket.io): Rauch has been a vocal proponent of vibe coding as the bridge between business logic and shipping software. He argues that vibe coding solves the "execution gap," enabling technical founders and engineers to ship complex products without getting bogged down in boilerplate, effectively treating the AI as a "junior engineer with infinite stamina" that requires high-level direction.

DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson) (Creator of Ruby on Rails & CTO at 37signals): Historically a skeptic of industry hype, DHH has acknowledged the "tipping point" in 2026, noting that agentic coding has become a viable tool for experienced developers to deliver on specs rapidly. His shift represents a major endorsement from the "craftsman" sector of the industry, validating that AI tools can coexist with high standards for code quality.

Rich Harris (Creator of Svelte): Harris has spoken about how AI-driven workflows liberate developers from "code preferences" and syntax debates. He views the 2026 landscape as one where the engineer's job is to focus on the "what" and "why" of a product, while AI increasingly handles the "how," allowing for a renaissance in creativity and shipping speed.

Addy Osmani (Engineering Manager for Chrome Web Platform): While deeply embedded in the browser ecosystem, Osmani has published extensively on his "AI-augmented" workflow in 2026. He characterizes the modern senior engineer not as a typist but as a "Director," whose primary skill is effectively guiding AI agents to execute complex engineering tasks while maintaining architectural integrity.

The above is just a smattering of individuals. I can keep going.

If people are really technical, then a language subset is fine.

If they're not really technical, then you might need a separate utility to manipulate the config file, and XML is OK if you need a separate utility. There are readers/writers available in every language, and it's human readable enough for debugging, but if a non-technical human mistakenly edits it, it might take some repair to make it usable again.

Even if you've decided on a separate config language, there are a lot of reasons why you might want to use something other than XML. The header/key/value system (e.g. the one that .gitconfig and a lot of /etc files use) remains popular.

I could be wrong, but it always seemed to me that XML was pushed as a doc/interchange format, and its use in config files was driven by "I already have this hammer and I know how to use it."

> In the original form of the Olympics, a Roman senator would have been ineligible to compete, since the Olympics was open only to Greeks.

I did debate how to word that mixing of Greek and Roman things in the same sentence. I had emotional context I wanted to convey and considered a word like Decathlon there as more technically correct, but then fought the modern context that of the people that even know what the Decathlon is they know it in the context of it being a smaller event in the modern Olympics, from which perspective Olympics remains more technically correct as the modern English word for both.

As to the text you are quoting, I think it as much supports my claims as you think it doesn't. Ignoring the subject change from "weightlifting" (and sports more generally) to farming and soldiering, it mostly describes the general state of armies and feudalism in general through much of time: you have the rank and file from blue collar classes, and you have the officer corps from white collar classes. The wealthier class is fewer, but given more charge and importance. The lower class does more of the grunt work. The Romans had rich Officers and blue collar "enlisted".

The myth that I was referring to was that weightlifting is somehow a new invention because no one labors physically anymore. There have always been leisure classes that needed to lift weights as a hobby to get good at sports (and that class was also more often awarded medals in sports or important commands in armies, if we want to also connect to the blog post you quoted). As far as I'm aware there was never a period in recorded history where "everyone" was equally fit from physical labor and there was no such thing as training and gyms and needing leisure time to do that.

[Further tangent: Even "pre-history" and the modern (mis)conception of the "paleo ideal" idea of tribes of equally buff hunter-gatherers starts to fall apart when you ask questions about family units or what they think the "gatherer" side of the equation meant (and manage to divorce it from modern ideas of agriculture being highly intense labor) or what those societies would look like if more people lived to old age or how those societies survived things like the Ice Age (fattier and more hibernatory, because we are a mammalian species, we cannot escape that).]

Yeah I just haven’t seen this happen. I’ve seen plenty of people graduate who were pretty useless. But … I think every self taught programmer I’ve worked with had meaningful gaps in their knowledge.

They’d spend a week in JavaScript to save them from 5 minutes with C or bash. Or they’d write incredibly slow code because they didn’t know the appropriate algorithms and data structures. They wouldn’t know how to profile their program to learn where the time is being spent. (Or that that’s even a thing). Some would have terrible intuitions around how the computer actually runs a program, so they can’t guess what would be fast or slow. I’ve seen wild abstractions to work around misunderstandings of the operating system. Hundreds of lines to deal with a case that can’t actually ever happen, or because someone missed the memo on a syscall that solves their exact problem. There’s also hairball nests of code because someone doesn’t know what a state machine is. Or how to factorise their problem in other ways. One guy I worked with thought the react team invented functional programming. Someone else doesn’t understand how you could write programs without OO inheritance. And I’ve seen so many bugs. Months of bugs, that could be prevented with the right design and tests.

I’ve worked with incredibly smart self taught programmers. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with. But the thing about blind spots is you don’t know you have them. You say you’re self taught, and self taught people can be better than people who went to school. In limited domains, yeah. Smart matters a lot. But you don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know what you missed out on. And you don’t know what problems in the workplace you could have easily solved if you knew how.

Nobody smart is going to disagree that LLMs are a huge net positive. The finer argument is whether or not at this point you can just hand off coding to an LLM. People who say yes simply just haven't had enough experience with using LLMs to a large extent. The amount of time you have to spend prompt engineering the correct response is often the same amount of time it takes for you to write the correct code yourself.

And yes, you can put together AGENT.md files, mcp servers, and so on, but then it becomes a game of this. https://xkcd.com/1205/