The thing is that some imagined AI that can reliably produce reliable software will also likely be able to be smart enough to come up with the requirements on its own. If vibe coding is that capable, then even vibe coding itself is redundant. In other words, vibe coding cannot possibly be "the future", because the moment vibe coding can do all that, vibe coding doesn't need to exist.
The converse is that if vibe coding is the future, that means we assume there are things the AI cannot do well (such as come up with requirements), at which point it's also likely it cannot actually vibe code that well.
The general problem is that once we start talking about imagined AI capabilities, both the capabilities and the constraints become arbitrary. If we imagine an AI that does X but not Y, we could just as easily imagine an AI that does both X and Y.
I agree with the first part which is basically 'being able to do a software engineers full job' is basically ASI/AGI complete.
But I think it is certainly possible that we reach a point/plateau where everything is just 'english -> code' compilation but that 'vibe coding' compilation step is really really good.
This is the most coherent comment in this thread. People who believe in vibe coding but not in generalizing it to “engineering”... brother the LLMs speak English. They can even hold conversations with your uncle.
My bet is that it will be good enough to devise the requirements.
They already can brainstorm new features and make roadmaps. If you give them more context about the business strategy/goals then they will make better guesses. If you give them more details about the user personas / feedback / etc they will prioritize better.
We're still just working our way up the ladder of systematizing that context, building better abstractions, workflows, etc.
If you were to start a new company with an AI assistant and feed it every piece of information (which it structures / summarizes synthesizes etc in a systematic way) even with finite context it's going to be damn good. I mean just imagine a system that can continuously read and structure all the data from regular news, market reports, competitor press releases, public user forums, sales call transcripts, etc etc. It's the dream of "big data".