There's a war going on right now, and if you're anywhere near software you already feel it. On one side: people using large language models to build things fast — the “vibe coders.” On the other: developers who've been writing code since the 90s and early 2000s, who can read C++ in their head, who got Linux running on a machine and then off it and configured every piece by hand. Real ones. And right now the real ones are stomping on the new ones every chance they get.

I'm not here to pick a winner on intelligence. I want to talk about the part nobody says out loud — because the second you say it, both sides' arguments fall apart.

First, let's kill the “slop” argument

The loudest complaint is that vibe coders ship slop. Okay. Go back and look at the beginning of anything. When people were inventing the first programming languages and learning to talk to machines, you think that was clean? You think the first decade of software was pristine? It was a mess. Everything new starts messy. So on its face that argument doesn't hold weight — it's the reflex of people who need the new group to be bad so they can keep feeling ahead.

Let me remind everyone what coding actually is

I think people forgot. Coding is a language. That's it. It's a way for a human to tell a computer what to do. It isn't building. It isn't the idea. It isn't the product. It's the instruction layer between a person and a machine.

There are millions of people out there with degrees who can talk to a computer better than I can talk to almost anything. No doubt. They write Python, they write C++, they read every language fluently. That's a genuine skill and I respect it. You learned to speak to a machine better than most people speak to each other.

You learned to speak to a machine better than most people speak to each other. That's real. Now — can you actually tell it to go do something?

Can you give it a goal? Can you point it at a problem and break the boundaries of what you were taught to do? Or are you going to hold the traditions you were handed and never once think outside the box? Knowing the language cold and knowing what to build with it are two completely different muscles, and a lot of people confuse the first one for the second.

Computers were invented to get things done

Strip it all the way down. Computers and code exist to get things done — to automate tasks, to run calculations fast, to do a thousand things at once in parallel that a human never could. If we could have told a computer what to do without writing code, trust me, there would be no coders at all. And we're getting closer to exactly that every day.

Coding was never the thing. Building was the thing. Coding was just the toll booth you had to pass to get there.

So this is my actual point. LLMs that are good at code didn't take anything away from real builders — they handed them their time back. The people with real ideas, the inventors, the ones who can see the whole thing, don't have to sit stuck on one small piece of a project that has a thousand pieces. You used to only move as fast as you could get coders to code. Then you paid them. Then they argued. Then they forgot things and you waited some more. Meanwhile the models get a little better every single week.

Now be honest about why people are actually mad

The way I see it, the anger isn't really about quality. It's about this: the language they spent years mastering is now shared with everyone. The gate is gone. And some people cannot stand that.

Nobody's really mad about slop. They're mad that the door they spent ten years walking through just became a wall anybody can climb.

If your first instinct when a tool lowers the barrier is to protect the barrier, you just told everyone something about yourself. You're not upset about clean code. You want to gatekeep. And people like that get pushed out fast — not because anyone's cruel, but because refusing to move forward makes you a hindrance to the people who are. The good news is they're easy to spot. They put the target on themselves, which makes them easy to route around, easy to leave off the project, easy to keep away from the thing you're building.

And the “sloppy code” thing again — show me the clean commits

Second argument: vibe coders write bad code. Fine. Show me the millions of degreed developers with nothing but pristine commits. Show me the flawless history. You can't, because it doesn't exist. How much of the job is debugging and pull requests versus writing brand-new code? It's lopsided. Most of the work is fixing, reviewing, and patching what already exists.

Sit with what that means. A huge share of developers have jobs not because their architecture is perfect, but because they're constantly debugging the things they themselves created. That's the job. So throwing “your code isn't clean” as the knockout punch is throwing a rock from inside a glass house.

How I actually use this — and how I don't

I'll be clear about something, because there's a wrong way to do this too. I don't hand my companies to AI. I don't type a prompt and tell it to go run my business. That's not how I think, and I don't think we should be building toward that. There's a whole crowd that wants a black box they can walk up to and say “make my life better, do it all for me.” That's not me.

I use it as a hybrid. I use it to move faster and to teach me faster. I don't tell it to do the thing — a lot of the time I tell it to teach me how to do the thing. That's a completely different relationship with the tool.

But here's the real-world version. I run a real services business, by myself. I'm a single dad. Plenty of days I'm out in the field doing the actual work, and while I'm gone, twenty people are calling — five, ten minutes each — and I physically cannot be in two places at once. If I can automate the parts that don't need me standing there, so I'm free to go do the parts that do, that's not cheating. That's the difference between making money and not. Let the system flag me when an email comes in. Let it calculate the things I'd calculate. It's a tool. I'm still the one running it.

This is the worst it will ever be

Remember how new this is. LLMs have only been hitting coding hard for what, six or seven months of real adoption? Look at what people are already doing with them. Now ask yourself what it looks like a year from now. Two years. If debugging stops being the thing you can safely bill for, a massive chunk of developers just lost the moat they were standing on — and they'll lose ground to the people who can actually think creatively and build.

My whole motto in this is simple: builders can now build without waiting on other builders. That's it. And I think that — not slop, not quality — is what the argument is really about. The sharp ones who understand exactly what these models do for a business and for money aren't confused. They're nervous.

Picture it. You went to school. You taught yourself C++. You worked yourself half to death to land the internship at the place everyone wants. And now a 21-year-old who can barely read Python just built an entire game — and you, the better coder, couldn't ship that same thing solo. Can't even picture doing it. That's not a knock on your skill. It's the world moving, and it stings.

College taught you to think inside the lines

Here's a harder one. A lot of traditional training doesn't teach you to think — it teaches you to think the way you were told, inside boundaries someone else drew, handed down by people who were taught inside those same boundaries. Fifty years, roughly the same curriculum. So the people carrying those traditions the hardest are going to sit with their arms crossed saying “that won't work, they taught me it doesn't work that way” — while the builders go find out for themselves, try the thing, break it, learn something, and keep moving. One group protects what it was handed. The other discovers what's actually possible.

So pick a lane

If you're arguing against growth, you're a hindrance to growth — and honestly, I wouldn't expect you to say anything different. But the people showing up excited, wanting to advance, trying to soak up as much as they can before they plant a flag or throw an opinion — those are the adults in the room. The ones who process before they react. Those are the people worth listening to and worth following. Not the loudest, most emotional voices in the thread who only want to complain, argue, and scream that it can't be done.

I'm genuinely excited about all of it. New people with real ideas finally have the tool to go build them. That's a good thing. And it only gets better from here.