Vibe Coding Won't Kill Developers. It'll Kill the Middle.
When good cameras got cheap, everyone predicted the death of professional photography. The prediction landed wrong. The low end died outright: stock libraries, cheap portraits, mass-event coverage went to anyone with a phone and a free editing app. The high end did better than ever — editorial work, photojournalism with access nobody else had, an aesthetic you could not reproduce by buying the same gear. The damage landed in the middle. Small weddings, corporate headshots, real estate listings, the steady unglamorous bulk of the market: not extinction, compression. Prices fell, volume moved to cheaper substitutes, and the survivors climbed up or specialized out. That compression is the cleanest map I know for what AI-assisted coding is doing to software work. And this half I know from inside: two decades leading dev teams, and now building AI tooling for them. The comfortable half of the argument The reassuring version of this is everywhere right now: you were never paid to type, you were paid to think, so AI just frees you to do the valuable part. It's not wrong. It's just the half that's easy to hear. The other half is about the market, not about you. Judgment, architecture, knowing what breaks in maintenance, deciding what not to build — a model that writes plausible code on command doesn't commoditize any of that. I have watched weeks of confusion land on people who could not read what a capable model generated; the gap was never the tool, and better AI autocomplete does not close that gap. But "judgment beats typing" answers only a question about skill and dodges the question about market structure. AI doesn't replace developers as a class; it commoditizes a segment. The segment it hits first is the same one the camera hit: the middle. The junior-to-mid tier that lived on CRUD apps, simple integrations, brochure sites, the standard internal tool with a form and a table behind it. That work was always implementation against a known spec, and implementation again