2026, Vibecoding?

The technological utopia

According to Gemini (Google’s AI), “the technological utopia is the belief that scientific and technological advancements can create an ideal society, eliminating problems like scarcity, suffering, and even death, through innovations such as smart cities, AI, and biotechnology.”

Have you ever thought about a world where we no longer needed to work? A world where all resources were automatically extracted, processed, and distributed in the most optimized way possible, and all of us had everything we wanted easily within reach?

If you don’t know it, Wall-E is a 2008 film by Disney and Pixar that clearly exposes the problem with the idea of a technological utopia. In the movie, humans live in a fully automated spaceship, where robots and systems do everything, from walking to choosing what food to eat. What was supposed to be absolute comfort, a “perfect” life, ends up resulting in a very sad, physically degenerated, intellectually empty, and emotionally numb human population. Technology, which should serve humans, ends up replacing the need to be human.

The impact of AIs

We are far from such a situation, but not too comfortably far, especially in certain contexts. The year 2025 was marked by many things, but in the tech world, AIs were certainly the spotlight characters. Generative AIs are capable of things that, just one or two years ago, were thought impossible, and new automation tools using AI gave rise to many bots, courses, meetings, corporate campaigns about being “tech-first”_, and, above all, many layoffs.

There is much to think about all of this, and there is a lot of speculation in various forms across different contexts. Those who were previously responsible for handling spreadsheets, making schedules, records, plans, reports, and charts are suddenly, in large part, dispensable. And those are just examples. A company can replace almost an entire team with subscriptions to three different AI services, much cheaper, and one human responsible for guiding them and doing the famous sanity check. Income is leaving the hands of the workforce that once formed small communities around the company, in a broad sense, and going to the big tech companies – Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Microsoft, X, etc. There comes that feeling of wondering about where this will end, conjectures, hypotheses; but while this is a collective and important concern, I also started to plan for my own future.

New year, now what?

Did I make too long an introduction? Certainly. Am I exaggerating? Debatable. I get worried, but at the same time, there is something human in me that gets excited about shake-ups and prospects of change. Because of all this, at this turn of the year, I stopped to reflect a bit on my life and my family’s, since I like to explore the power of software technologies, and that is what I am trying to make a living from.

I really enjoy programming, understanding algorithms, patterns in data, solving data flow problems, creating interfaces, customizable systems, visualizations, simulations, and, generally and concretely, beautiful and interesting digital environments. However, I also saw all the buzz, the controversies, the good and bad examples of AI’s power to do this work of generating code, the famous vibecoding.

For a while now, I’ve been using AI chats to help me program, asking questions, exploring possibilities, finding bugs, etc., but after giving myself a break from machines and work, I dove into a series of more serious tests and, after a few more days, I came to the conclusion that it is undeniable that, despite some errors and frustrations, I can produce much more by writing more prompts and less code, focusing mainly on having ideas, making decisions, and orchestrating the whole process rather than on the syntax of the programming language and libraries. In fact, reviewing all that code, I learned things that probably wouldn’t have crossed my path so easily, shortcuts I previously didn’t know.

I confess this scares me. Will I have a nice career in the field? Will programming become a cultural niche, a hobby for code art enthusiasts? Either way, I am still an inventive person, I still feel fulfilled pushing the limits of creativity and seeing ideas transform from little letters into spaces, colors, and connections. The message that remains is that, although we must remain critical, cautious, and often skeptical of the uses and impacts of artificial intelligences, we will be naïve techno-dandies if we don’t start giving these tools our own use.