Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Programming Languages vs Vibe Coding

"Programming languages are dead." "Soon, you’ll just describe what you want in plain English."

We’ve all heard it. And sure, what LLMs can do is impressive - they can turn a simple prompt into functional code in seconds. But here’s the catch: whose prompt are we talking about? Mine? Yours?

It doesn't matter if the model understands us both. The real question is: do we understand each other? If I write a spec like Shakespeare and you write yours like James Joyce (or your mom, or whoever else), the AI might get it, but will we? Could you actually read a teammate’s "plain text" spec and catch a logical error? What about "Code reviewing" that becomes "Prose reviewing"?

It's great not having to focus on every semicolon in our C++ or Rust. We can stop thinking about syntax. But we still need a way to express semantics.

I wonder if we’ll ditch programming languages only to realize that we need an intermediate way to express our intent - not so the machines can understand us, but so we can. Will we end up just reinventing programming languages all over again?

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