LLMs & AI Agents Didn't Replace Programming - They Evolved It

I've been programming with LLMs since 2022, implementing systems of varied complexity, both professionally and exploratory/hobby projects. And I will continue to do so in 2026. However, it's important to be aware of its limits.

Vibe/agent coding for critical systems doesn't work well (yet).

You'll also be disappointed if you're trying to do something with financial markets (e.g. Machine-Learning based models).

Vibe coded apps also frequently come with security vulnerabilities (for many apps this may be an acceptable compromise).

I don't think you'd be comfortable with driving a vehicle with all of its software vibe-coded, or with all code written by an agentic system, without thorough human investment.

LLMs are good at solving problems that have been solved many time before, but this abstraction quickly breaks apart if you delve with them into less developed topics, which frequent tend to be more complex. Pattern matching based prediction is very powerful, but you need enough patterns to learn from, alongside the correct context.

Additionally, vibe-coding a large codebase is one thing, while maintaining that same codebase is another.

Autopilot in commercial airplanes didn't deprecate carbon-based human pilots, but it did deprecate pilots who didn't commit to learning and integrating autopilot during the flight.

So is programming really dead, or has it merely evolved? 🤔