Vibe Coding has changed EVERYTHING. And the ones having the hardest time embracing this change may be the ones who have weathered the most change in their careers: GenX and Millennial senior developers. Because coding no longer involves writing code. It's about context engineering. Meanwhile, more junior GenZ (and possibly even GenAlpha) developers who have had less traditional coding experience to begin with, seem better positioned to flourish in AI native development. In this edition of Geeking Out LIVE, our GenX and Millennial panelists talk about their love-hate relationship with vibe coding, how to cope with the changing development landscape, and how the junior/senior developer relationship is important now, more than ever.
00:08 Intro
00:42 Guest intros
03:15 What was your first programming language?
07:59 IDEs took the mental load out of coding
11:21 AI-assisted coding is ADHD friendly
11:40 What do you despise most about hand coding?
13:34 What's your coder persona?
17:50 How do you feel about trusting AI implicitly to write code in a language you don't know?
23:04 Cassidy rant
28:19 Failure is a teaching aid
33:14 "Awesome Slop"
35:13 AI + domain name purchase side effect
36:49 Vibe coding + startup founders
41:54 Are Gen Z/Gen Alpha better positioned as devs in the AI native era?
45:36 Beware the non-developers with no coding experience'
53:35 Why is the AI writing React for me?
58:25 What's the most important skill a software engineer needs today?
Cassidy Williams
Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub! Outside of that fancy title, Cassidy is a startup advisor and investor, open source-er, and meme-maker on the internet. She enjoys building mechanical keyboards, playing music, hanging out with family and friends, and teaching in her free time.
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Tim Banks (they/them)
Tim’s tech career spans over 25 years through various sectors. Tim’s initial journey into tech started in avionics in the US Marine Corps and then into various government contracting roles. After moving to the private sector, Tim worked both in large corporate environments and in small startups, honing his skills in systems administration, automation, architecture, and operations for large cloud-based datastores.
Today, Tim leverages their years in operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering to advise and consult with the open source and cloud computing communities in his current role. Tim is also a competitive Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu practitioner. They are the 2-time American National and is the 5-time Pan American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu champion in their division.
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Jeff Blankenburg
Jeff Blankenburg spent the early part of his career in digital advertising, building websites for Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Ford Motor Company, among others. He also spent 8 years at Microsoft, primarily as an evangelist for any new technology he could get his hands on. He followed his passion to Amazon, where he was the Chief Technical Evangelist for Alexa for 7 years.
Today, he is the Principal Developer Advocate at Dynatrace, helping developers make cloud native apps easier to build and maintain. Jeff has spoken at conferences all over the world, including London, Munich, India, Tokyo, Sydney, and New York, covering topics ranging from software development technologies to soft skill techniques. He also serves as an organizer for the Stir Trek conference.
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Josh Lee
Josh is a Developer Advocate at Altinity, where he applies his observability and engineering background to ClickHouse use cases. He has over 15 years of experience in developing and leading software projects for various clients and industries. Josh is also a speaker and a contributor to the OpenTelemetry and CNCF communities, sharing his insights and best practices on topics such as distributed tracing. He is always eager to learn new things and explore new challenges, and he strives to create elegant and innovative solutions that take into account the nuances and correlations of complex problems.
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