The vibe coder's career path is doomed

I spent more time testing and writing instruction files for Claude than I’ve ever spent on any project of this size. I’ve worked with junior devs straight out of bootcamp and none required this level of hand-holding.
LLMs aren’t a new abstraction layer. It’s just a different interface paradigm. You’re trading syntax for natural language and determinism for uncertainty.
Either AI is years away from writing production-quality code and there’s no urgency or it will soon make coding so trivial that it becomes minimum-wage work. There’s no lucrative middle ground where ‘AI whispering’ is a high-value skill.
Breakthroughs are rare. Modern LLMs are based on Google’s papers: “Attention Is All You Need” (2017) and BERT (2018). Almost a decade ago. Since then, improvements have come from scaling, not new architectures. Every new release is becoming less and less impressive because transformers are just hitting fundamental limitations that incremental improvements can’t solve.