I don't think it's such a simple dichotomy; And dismissing the possibilites of agentic coding as inherently non-SWE is rather short-sighted: You CAN use agents as a software engineering tool.

It's just that it's often misaligned with the processes we're used to. But that does not mean that LLM-agents a bad tool.

The Software Engineer will know what decision to make even without looking at the code.

The best I have is that engineering is the real-world, practical application of the scientific method deployed in service of human values. (The human values bit is important to my mind, as I don't believe experimentation over disconnected, stochastically generated hypothesis counts as science.)

By this definition, vibe-coding does introduce a wrinkle because it becomes more difficult to experimentally verify hypothesis as you have reduced how much you are observing, but it's not a hard impossibility or anything like that.

and maybe not a team that looks anything like the teams that built and maintain the large codebases that are out there.

the distinction in this article makes all the sense in the world to me, and definitely helps as i try to figure out what term i use to describe my current status as a thing-producer, but part of why i just call myself nothing is it is entirely unclear to me what the new configurations of infra + product vision > actual v0.1.0 launch > new feature development "teamlines" are going to end up looking like.

if i had to guess, one such config might be "the 0.1% of vibe coders who took the HN crickets in response to their projects to figure out how to learn how to do what a product engineering team needs to do end to end to make a self-sustainable product."

(self being that one person, not the product itself)

The Vibe Coder is the one building prototypes to flesh out ideas, and once they flushed out the idea, they hand if off to the workers to follow standards to implement.

Although at the end of the article he does say that people should fall into both vibe/eng. and that is probably a good place to be to stay relevant in the future.

No, it's just a tool. Like a spoon, or a pen, or a piece of paper, or a vehicle, or a gun.