> It's the "semblance of understanding" you're holding on to that is keeping your demand limited. I'm holding onto it as well, but I think these companies are assuming that human understanding will no longer be relevant for most codebases going forward.

In short, seems to describe vibe-coding to me? What I don't understand about companies attempting to vibe code is if they realize that other people (especially sometimes their customers) can tailor-made their own software for their own needs, or rather competitors can be dime a dozen and maybe even a fight for constantly paying for the better model.

There was a comment[0] from a just few days ago by @jjcm (which I wish to quote which I hope they don't mind.):

> I just got back from a 2 week trip to China. I was in some of the more remote parts and my cell wasn't able to connect to their towers in that area, resulting in me not having the tourist VPN.

> The side effect was I was fully cut off from my AI tools for those two weeks. I was coding "manually" during that time, and I think I accompished in two weeks what I previously had been able to do in a day. I'm not gonna lie, it was very, very stressful as a solo founder.

> The industry moves so fast these days, that the only way to keep up with the speed is to leverage them. While I can appreciate the push of this to help your brain think independently/critically, the opportunity cost of a month of development without LLMs is too high a price to pay.

What happens if the opportunity cost of a month of development with vs without human understanding becomes too high a price to pay. I feel like we would be in awkward time because of the factors that I had described above (higher competition, software stops meaning just as much software as people would be custom-making them.)

I think that (former fly.io's) @tptacek's article[1] starts making more sense if viewed from this direction: What even is an OS now.

I don't have the answer to this question as to what happens next but its a form of development that I would prefer not to happen on a more gut instinct level?

Letting AI basically control everything and us not having any mental understanding of sorts and sort of becoming the meat-proxies just for economical reasons seems realistic possibility but a bleaker reality at that. I am left feeling a little bit uncomfortable if this reality turns out to be true.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49808422

[1]: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2026/09/25/what-even-is-an-os-no...