Is vibe coding taking people's jobs? Not in my case, and here's the test I use

There's a second version of the question "is vibe coding bad?", and it isn't about bugs, security or code quality. (I've written about that side in Is vibe coding bad? An honest answer from someone who ships with it.) It's about people. When someone builds an app with an AI agent, is a developer somewhere out of a job?

It's a fair question, and I've asked it of myself. Here's my honest answer, for my own work.

I haven't replaced anyone

So far, I've never used AI to do something I would previously have asked a person to do. I haven't cancelled a contract, skipped a hire, or turned down a freelancer because an agent could do it instead.

What I have done is build things I've always wanted to build, but never had the time, the skills or the resources to make happen.

Vibe Leagues, the site you're reading, is one of them. So is Auto-Cue, a social-media tool that runs entirely on your own computer. Before AI coding agents, these weren't projects waiting for a developer I couldn't afford. They were ideas in a notebook. The honest alternative to building them with AI wasn't "hire someone". It was that they would never have existed at all.

Something from nothing isn't a loss

That's the part I think the jobs debate often misses. People count an AI-built app as a job taken. But a job is only taken if the work was going to be paid for otherwise.

For a lot of what vibe coders make, it wasn't. The real counterfactual is nothing:

• the side project that stays a note on your phone;
• the tool you wanted for your own business but could never justify paying an agency for;
• the small, specific app for a hobby or a community that no company would ever build, because there's no market big enough to pay for it.

When those things get built, the world has something it didn't have before, and nobody lost work to make it happen. I count that as a net positive, not a missed opportunity for another human being.

The honest counter-case

It would be dishonest to stop there, because my experience isn't everyone's.

AI is being used to replace paid work. Some companies are hiring fewer junior developers, writers and designers because they expect software to do part of the job. If that's your livelihood, my "net positive" isn't much comfort, and I'm not going to pretend it should be.

So I'm not claiming vibe coding is harmless everywhere. I'm saying the question has two very different answers depending on what the AI is used for, and lumping them together makes the conversation worse:

• Substitution: using AI to do work you'd otherwise have paid a person for. That's a real trade-off, with real people on the other side of it.
• Creation: using AI to make something that otherwise wouldn't be made at all. That's new value, and there's no one on the other side.

Everything I've built with AI so far is the second kind: my own ideas, on my own time, with my own money.

A test you can use

If you're wondering which side your own use falls on, ask yourself one question before you start:

If AI didn't exist, would I have paid someone to do this?

• If the answer is yes, you're substituting. That's not automatically wrong, since businesses have always chosen between tools and people, but be honest that it's a choice with a cost to someone.
• If the answer is no, because the honest alternative was never building it, you're creating. You're adding something to the world that wasn't going to exist.

For me, so far, the answer has been no every time.

What it's done to my work

One more thing I didn't expect. Building with AI hasn't made me do less. It's made me do more, and do things I couldn't do before. I've learned a great deal about databases, security and shipping software, mostly by watching an agent get things wrong and working out why.

It hasn't replaced my work. It's widened what my work can be, and I suspect that's true for a lot of people building this way.

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If you're a vibe coder who's building something that wouldn't otherwise exist, that's exactly the story Vibe Leagues is for: what you made, why, and what went wrong on the way. Request an invite and share it.