Dragon Quest and vibe coding (stick with me here)

I was listening to the latest episode of The Besties, and they said something about the auto-battle system in the new Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined game that really resonated with me.

It is funny, as you progress through, if you're just auto battling the whole time, it will, it's just this thing of like, wow, this is seems super easy. I'm just kind of churning through these. And then you'll watch this battle start to break bad in a way that like, I don't really know how to help you guys.

I haven't been playing the whole time. Wow, you guys are really getting your asses kicked. Ah, dag nabbit, this fell apart fast.

I wish I'd done, I should have done something. I should have stopped this. I was watching it unfold.

So basically, the Dragon Quest games for quite a while now have had auto battle features where you can just have your party choose how to battle for you. It's a quality of life thing, and you don't have to use it if you don't want, but you can absolutely make significant progress in these games and even complete them by using the auto battle system.

I couldn't help but think about exactly this situation they describe here, where the auto battle system works great until it suddenly doesn't. And because you don't know anything, you can't jump in and take over and fix what's going on. It was impossible for me to hear this and not immediately have my mind jump to vibe coding. As I wrote in a recent members post, I don't think what I'm doing is vibe coding, but I do think that people who fall more into that category of generating code that they literally do not understand, the more they're going to run into these situations. If you don't know what tech stack you're using or why things work in the first place, then if things go wrong and the computer isn't able to fix it for you, then you're in a sticky situation.

And this is why I think that skilled developers, while they may not be writing every single line of code in the future, they will still bring value by understanding systems. Related, a thing I think about sometimes is that you only truly know how valuable a person is to an institution when things go wrong; if things have gone off the rails, who can get you back on track? Those people are super valuable.