Vibe coding isn't dying — it's undergoing a "literacy correction"¶
Insight: The drop in codegen platform usage (Similarweb data, flagged by Chamath Palihapitiya) isn't the death of vibe coding — it's a filtering of "wishful prompting" and the emergence of a new literacy curve. Newcomers who were promised "English is the new programming language" are leaving in frustration, but the build process has already crossed a point of no return. Vibe coding was never about replacing developers — it was about democratizing who gets to build "software for one."
Detail: Gary Marcus argued amateurs won't replace teams of coders, but that was never the point. The real signal: junior developers are being replaced by senior developers equipped with AI agents (cited from "Canaries in the Coal Mine" paper on employment effects of AI). The displacement is part of the transition but not the heart of it — the deeper story is expansion of who can build. The correction phase is where people learn that effective vibe coding requires its own form of literacy, not just typing natural language.