Just after Christmas something changed in the attitudes of the senior engineers I follow. LLM coding took another step forward.
Skeptics became converts, and converts became bulls.
'bout half the engineers I admired pre-ChatGPT have become massive coding agent bulls in the past couple weeks. DHH flipped a few days ago. The others may join the mob before Q1 ends. Heady days.
— Jonathon Belotti (@jonobelotti_IO) January 4, 2026
- Linus Torvalds is letting AI review Linux patches. (Update: he’s also vibe coding)
- Andrej Karpathy (of course) tweeted that he’s “never felt this much behind as a programmer”.
- Rails’ DHH became a convert.
- Salvatore Sanfilippo (antirez), creator of Redis, said just a few hours ago that “it is simply impossible not to see the reality of what is happening.”
- George Hotz, a notable grump, begrudingly called agents “decent”.
- Jake Cooper, founder of Railway, just blogged that “programming as we know it is dead” and that with the power we should start building “hyperstructures”.
- Steve Yegge posted Welcome to Gas Town a delightfully unhinged but apparently working AI agent bonanza.
- Mitchell Hashimoto, retired founder of Hashicorp and creator of Ghosty, said “Slop drives me crazy and it feels like 95+% of bug reports, but man, AI code analysis is getting really good”.
- Marc Brooker, distinguished eng at AWS, endorsed and (kinda) named vibe coding’s next phase: specification driven development (SDD).
We might be around 6 months from Jonathan Blow getting onboard.
In the past this has seemed like bluster and people hyping things up for attention. I’m thinking of 9 months ago when Tobi Lutke posted “Reflexive AI usage is now baseline expectation at Shopify”.
But now? I dunno if it’s because I got ChatGPT Pro recently or because Opus 4.5 dropped and became my daily driver in Cursor, but the capabilities of coding agents feel much better.
Here’s what changed: the defining feature of vibe coding—shipping code without reading it—is becoming an accepted practice by highly skilled, staff+ engineers. What has replaced vibes is specification, where the engineer uses their skill to define the solution and then trusts the coding ability of the agent to autonomously implement and test itself against the solution spec. Spec-driven development.123
This gain of trust has dilated pupils and spiked ambition.
Heady days.