In the Era of "vibe Coding", When Agents Are Writing Code – What Are You Doing?
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I catch myself just sitting there, scrolling on my phone — and it feels like wasted time.
So I wonder: what’s the right human role in this loop? Higher-level design? System thinking? Critical auditing? Or are we destined to be “idle supervisors” while machines do the typing?
How are you using those gaps when the Agent is writing code?
The author reflects on the 'Vibe Coding' era where AI agents generate code, and wonders about the human role in this new paradigm, sparking a discussion on how developers are adapting to this change.
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While i expect that to be the case for junior dev positions, it very rapidly is not the case for even entry senior developer roles.
To answer your question, I’m busy solving non coding problems.
While one agent is busy, you can start another agent on a different task. (Or maybe even the same task with a variation in the prompt. To hedge against the unlikeliness of the first agent always one-shotting acceptable code.)
Even if you aren't verifying the resulting code, prompting six different agents and confirming their results should keep you busy. (I guess you could even do more if you wanted...)
I have seen various descriptions of this type of workflow. Most recently: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/45180353
> Now I see him spending most of his time doing what product managers traditionally do: talking to users, understanding their problems deeply, figuring out what's actually worth building. Coding has become maybe 20% of his job, and even that 20% is mostly about understanding requirements and translating them into clear specifications. The actual implementation work that used to consume 80% of his time is now handled by machines.
Also here is a short video of this type of workflow in action: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/tP1fuFpJt7g
The downside is I don't really like starting from "scratch" without these tools anymore. They save so much time for drudge work / migrating changes across large portions of code - I miss the manual way but if I'm being honest not really.
I code as much as I can without ai tools in order to stay fresh for interviews though. It's really eye opening to see how lost non-technical people without a software background get even with the latest cursor tools.
In the future, architectural understanding and knowing how to scale a project will pay top dollar.
And I am just a support person, so not directly affected. My core tasks are to support customers and to provide input to developers about the common points of struggling.