The mission of a professional programmer is to deliver code that works according to the design specs, handles edge cases, fails gracefully and doesn't contain performance bottlenecks. It could be software for a water plant, or software that incurs charges to accomplish it's task and could bankrupt you if there is a mistake. It doesn't have to be a matter of life or death.
But there are a lot of projects and problem domains that don't even demand that much or have any real consequences for failure. I look at all the self-service stuff my employer has for HR, benefits, policy compliance, it's all half-broken, nobody ever seems to get held to fixing anything, and the only answers are "try it again later."
Professional programmers built this stuff too, or maybe it was vibe-coded but since it's been like that for years I think probably not.
But we don't know where on the spectrum of "people might die" to "try again later" most of these programmers who claim great productivity gains from LLMs lie. Maybe it is making them 10x faster at churning out shit, who knows? They might not even realise it themselves.
