Cheese Wars: Rise of the Vibe Coder

Published November 2025, eighteen months after Death of the Junior Developer. After watching AI transformations across companies for a year and a half, Steve's verdict on the question that essay didn't quite ask — do programmers matter? — is yes: programmers will matter because everyone will be one. The trad-code job pool is evaporating into a niche; vibe coding is the new default. But the bigger half of the essay is about the Cheese Wars the title points at — the fight, Steve argues, is company vs. company, not man vs. AI. He sketches three categories: Cat-1 (actively working against humanity flourishing — increasingly populated by Silicon Valley names that aren't hiding it), Cat-2 (the orthogonal middle), and Cat-3 (primary mission is humans flourishing). Grab is the Cat-3 case study from the social-mission side (lifting Southeast Asia out of poverty through safety and uplift, Anthony Tan's mom approving facilities budgets); Anthropic is the Cat-3 case study from the safety side (Long-Term Benefit Trust and Responsible Scaling Policy as structural anti-drift mechanisms).