On Vibe Coding and Arguments with IT Professionals
Translated from Russian with the help of AI. Original: Russian version
How AI and vibe coding raise labor productivity and change the role of IT specialists, especially in small business.
Yesterday I wrote a Threads post about vibe coding and received mixed comments from IT professionals. The general message was that it is all nonsense, and that the foundation of any IT product is not code but architecture, documentation and so on. To me it looked more like a defense of their own profession. I by no means meant that IT specialists are not needed. On the contrary, AI greatly speeds up development. Simple coding will, in effect, be done entirely by AI, while architects and highly specialized experts will be able to launch products faster and, essentially, become one-person development teams.
AI is not about replacing people, but about a serious shift in labor productivity within companies. Anyone who cannot use AI becomes simply uncompetitive, and their place will be taken by someone who knows AI tools. It is like a financial professional not knowing Excel twenty years ago. Today AI greatly speeds up work in any intellectual industry.
The way I see it, what used to take 10 people can now in practice be done by 2-3. It is only a matter of building the processes correctly.
Here is a real case. I have a small startup where we built a customer service system with a database of all transactions. Because the company is small, nobody could build me proper customer analytics. For everyone this takes a lot of time and money, since IT specialists are constantly busy with ongoing product improvements. They were ready to take on my requests in a month or two, because at the moment it was not a priority. So I took Replit, connected it to the database and built myself online dashboards exactly as I needed them. It took me about two days. That is what higher labor productivity looks like. Now my main assistant is AI, and it replaces many functions.
This is very important for small business. SMEs have no money, but AI lets them get many things done very quickly without turning to expensive services.
So the IT people are absolutely right that you cannot build a good product without them. But that is not the point. The point is that building the same product will now require far fewer IT specialists, and only highly qualified ones.
The same applies to every industry. In advertising, for example, AI will let you create video clips in minutes. In translation, a large number of translators is no longer needed, because AI can do the translation and the translator's job is to check it. A quick calculation for a simple project can now be done with AI. Analyzing a database for fraud can also be done by AI. There are thousands of such processes where AI will replace unskilled labor. The human's task will remain to analyze and make decisions.