I’ve been scrolling on Twitter lately, and all I could see was the sheer hate for “vibe coders” being thrown around by the traditional crew. It’s constant arguing about who’s “real” and who’s “cheating.”
It made me stop and ask: wait a minute, this can’t be the first time this is happening. I can easily imagine a time when programmers were using binary as the only source of communication with a computer. What the flip did those binary masters think of the first assembler?
So, I did some digging, and here’s the deal: this isn’t a new debate at all. It’s one that’s about 70 years old, and the “vibe coder” phenomenon is just the latest chapter. Maybe people should just chill.
The truth is, the current insult for anyone leaning on AI tools like Gemini or Copilot, calling them lazy, unskilled, or lacking rigor, is just an echo. The core issue remains, as it always has: The War on Abstraction.
The Historical Resistance to “Convenience”
Every time we figure out a cooler, faster way to talk to computers, the exact same argument arises. Were the pioneers who first ditched raw numbers for symbolic logic seen as slackers? You bet they were.
1. The Binary Barrier
Back in the 1950s, real programming mastery meant working in Machine Code. You wrote in raw binary, and you had to hold the entire machine state, memory registers, addresses, and everything, in your head. It was next-level mental gymnastics.
Then Assembly Language showed up. Suddenly, you could use simple English mnemonics like ADD or JMP instead of memorizing long strings of zeroes and ones. The old guard went nuts. They saw Assembly as a crutch, arguing it sacrificed total control and efficiency for a bit of simple convenience. They felt relying on the assembler meant the programmer was suddenly soft.
2. The FORTRAN Fear
The moment that perfectly mirrors today’s “vibe coder” drama came with the first High-Level Languages like FORTRAN and COBOL in the late 1950s. Seriously, imagine being the Assembly expert who spent days writing complicated code just to achieve what a FORTRAN user could do with one single line: A = B + C. The critics were brutal. Their arguments were exactly what you hear today:
• “These languages are for non-programmers!” ( people who just wanted quick results).
• “The Compiler is flawed!” (They deeply suspected the program translating the simple code couldn’t be trusted to be efficient).
• “They are intellectually lazy!” (They don’t have to know the underlying hardware architecture anymore).
This is the exact same, tired fear we hear right now: If you don’t fully control the translation process, are you still a true practitioner? The answer has been “Yes” every time this has happened.
The debate isn’t about skill level; it’s about where skill is applied. Mastering the nuances of prompt engineering, architectural validation, and complex system design is the new hard-earned discipline. The developers who will define the future won’t be those who scorn the tools, but those who are the most masterful at wielding them to solve problems faster and at a greater scale.
Every generation of coding veterans has felt superior to the next. But here’s the lesson for everyone: The “lazy” user of the new tool has always been the one to define the future of the profession. What do you think?