2UP // second life for devs

When vibe coding was born, we were scared. The one thing we had mastery of and a wide moat to cross was code. Suddenly the value of three decades of accumulated craft was no longer a defence.

Work that used to come the way of the agency and freelancer disappeared. No more calls.

But it was a short lived silence.

Clients who were together enough to use tech had started rolling their own - until they couldn't. I got an email from someone excitedly telling me he'd vibe coded a system to predict energy prices, until I showed him the prices were hard coded. Another from someone who'd knocked up their unhackable directory website, until I sent them a link to their whole open database.

Turned out there were limits to what the untrained, or inexperienced coder could do.

And why wouldn't there be? Give an amateur a pan, burner, eggs milk and sugar and they'll make lumpy custard. Give the same to a chef and you'll eat crème anglaise.

AI coding tools provide unbelievable gains when problems fit a certain shape - dashboards, migrations, CRUD apps, APIs. The shape of most of what your average SME needs to work with. We aren't talking finance systems, mission critical ops, millisecond-difference apps; just the everyday stuff.

Once upon a time, the everyday cost a fortune. The economics of building a connector from System A to System B was so far out you'd be happy to leave your staff to battle legacy processes and do everything you could to smooth over the cracks.

But now the cost of implementation is tiny. The speed has gone from "Hmm, a couple of months" to "Let's see if we can do it this afternoon!".

You need experience in the mix. Developers who've been around the block and built these things the old way. Someone who can see what's possible. And that person can merrily keep slicing out inefficiency and replacing it with code day in and day out across an SME.

A new job role is emerging for devs - the Head of Internal Systems, replacing off the shelf packages that don't quite fit, creating connections between systems, automating low value jobs that used to take a day here and there into minutes.

It's all really rather exciting. Crème anglaise all round.