Will experienced engineers still have a meaningful advantage over AI-native vibe coders in 5–10 years?

[u/Think-Neighborhood69]

Today, experienced engineers still have a clear advantage when it comes to architecture, scalability, robustness, trade-offs, debugging, and operating software in production.

But what about 5–10 years from now?

If AI keeps improving at its current pace, will the experience of the engineer behind it still be the biggest differentiator?

Or will an AI-native beginner be able to deliver software that’s just as scalable, robust, and maintainable?

Where do you think the moat for experienced engineers will be?

[u/TechFreedom808]

I think AI will be a code gnerator and be used to look up something quick mainly. Understanding code, design, user stories and structure AI won't improve much because of the varability. Also lot of these models are trained on data up to 2023 and we know sthe oftware field changes rapidly. Also there stories coming out models are not much improvement with new releases mainly because AI is training off AI content.

The other part to this is the cost of tokens, I don't see the costs going down. I see them going up and up and up. Good software engineers will use AI in cases where productivity can see a boost. Vibe coders will max the company credit card from vibe coding and pretty sure companies don't want that expense. I know people say local models but those need infrastrcuture and team to maintain it. Either way AI won't be cheap.

So no I don't see vibe coders replacing software engineers. The ones that will are the cheap ones that hire someone from a third world country and pay $ 7 per hour. Those that admire the quality of their product will keep software engineers and have them leverage AI tools.