My job is to do my job

The back-and-forth about vibe coding versus being a real-life software developer remains fascinating. And so that there’s no confusion: Actual developers are incredible.

In a previous life, we basically built our own mashup of IMDB and Reelgood, answering the question at the core of our mission: What to Watch. (Also where and how to watch it — and, by the way, making sure we got affiliate revenue for it.) I didn’t write a line of code. Am I a developer? Absolutely not. Project manager? Maybe.

I think back to that project a half-decade ago and how I currently interact with Claude Code. I don’t know how to actually write the code, or which functions and APIs to call. But I know what we want to have happen at the end, and whether we’re moving in the right direction. That’s true when working with human beings, and it’s true now when interacting with the front end of an LLM.

My job isn’t to know how to code. My job is to do my job.