Fuck AI

You can use local models for free, it's just slower.

It's not possible to make you unskilled if you're skilled. At worst, you'd get rusty. It is possible that your skills might not be in high demand anymore though.

The only thing that would make programmers not be in demand is if "vibe coding" were truly producing a better product than traditional programming. So far, the only ones making that claim are the ones desperately trying to sell "AI" before the bubble bursts. It's true that there are some companies that really want to believe it. But, companies are always desperately hoping for something that can allow them to fire their expensive workers. It's rare that that works out.

I have no idea what vibe coding is, can someone ELI5 it to me?

I have tried AI to get some rough C# for my hobby game but even that was unusable.

It's exactly the opposite of teaching a man to fish, this is telling that man to depend on whatever floats down the river and just pick whatever seems edible, if the man gets enough or poisons himself nobody will know, because the skill to fish would have been lost.

Like people who only had a smartphone for everything, they'll never know the advantages of an actual computer and will struggle with it when they need to use one.

I run free local models...

I'll go against the grain here: I'm not worried. If you actually care about what you do, even vibe coding can teach you something, it could be a starting point. The internet is not going away, and just looking up this or that thing the AI spit out will help you learn what you're working with.

Is it the same as an uni CS course? No of course, but how many of us got our start just tinkering with stuff we didn't understand?

As someone who can't code, I spent some time vibe coding a python bot that would take screenshots of a webpage and post them to Discord, but after an hour of creating more errors with each iteration, I gave up. I rather just get someone skilled and pay them for it as opposed to wasting time with something that thinks it's always right

I think this so much less convincing than selling AI as a replacement for skilled labor, not as a way to intentionally deskill actual software engineers.

Capitalism already has a way of preventing you from making your own commodities - you sell your time, and the less they pay you for it relative to how much you need to live, the less time you have for yourself to put towards self sufficiency. We don't have many FOSS products, not because nobody has the knowledge or skill to make them, but because nobody has the time to make them.

There are plenty of reasons to hate corporate-owned AI products, we don't need to be hallucinating new ones.