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I was scrolling through Twitter over breakfast when a push notification about IBM’s stock plunging 12% nearly made me spit out my coffee. Turns out, Anthropic—an AI company—dropped an announcement yesterday claiming their Claude Code could automatically modernize legacy COBOL systems, and the news punched a hole straight through the century-old tech giant.

The whole thing is surreal. COBOL is a programming language from the 1960s that’s still clinging to life in banking systems. There are probably fewer people in the U.S. who can write it today than those who can fix typewriters. Last year, when New York State posted a job for COBOL programmers requiring “at least 20 years of experience,” it became a viral meme. Now that AI claims it can handle the job, Wall Street collectively lost its cool.

But what really sent a chill down my spine was the flood of “Vibe Coding” in the comments. The term started as a joke in Karpathy’s tweets last year, but now it’s industry slang. In short, you don’t need to understand code—just yell at an AI, “Make me an app that auto-tracks expenses and sends cat emojis,” and it’ll spit out working software. Last week, a startup founder bragged about using this method to finish a project in three days that would’ve taken 20 person-months.

I immediately checked a few engineer group chats, and sure enough, chaos. Someone posted a demo from a domestic AI tool: input “an e-commerce page with fuzzy search,” and 30 seconds later, complete React code materializes. The comments split into two camps—”No more overtime!” and “Time to sign up for food delivery.”

The Chinese internet took it further by translating “Vibe Coding” as “氛围编程” (literally “ambience programming”). At first glance, I thought it was some meditation-based coding technique. But then a Shenzhen team actually rolled out a mystical twist—feeding the AI Tao Te Ching to generate Python code, allegedly with a “go-with-the-flow” style. Three years ago, they’d have been roasted as frauds on Zhihu; now, investors are lining up to wine and dine them.

Then today’s security breach snapped me back to reality. A financial platform’s payment system, built with Vibe Coding tools, was found to have a zero-click exploit—hackers could drain accounts without even touching a keyboard. The security team dug into it and discovered the AI had interpreted “authenticate user” as “check if the user’s profile picture is cute.”

The more I think about it, the weirder it gets. I tested a few mainstream AI coding tools by asking for a simple login function. The first version used emojis as passwords; the second skipped password verification entirely, with a comment reading, “Modern users hate complex flows.” No wonder veteran programmers are ranting on forums: “Are these AIs undercover product managers?”

The irony? Anthropic, which hypes AI replacing programmers, just got outplayed by Chinese firms. They accused three AI companies of using Claude-generated code to train their own models—only for netizens to spot “Powered by Claude” watermarks in one company’s output. Now, programmers on Twitter are memeing: “Using AI-generated code to train AI is like cooking instant noodles with its own seasoning packet.”

A Silicon Valley architect I know recently quit to teach yoga. Before leaving, he told me, “Coding now feels like teaching a person with Alzheimer’s to cook—you repeat ‘turn on the stove before adding oil’ 20 times, and they still microwave the pan.” Meanwhile, in China, “ambience programming” has birthed a new job title: prompt engineers, with hourly rates higher than mine.

Over dinner, a VC friend admitted his biggest fear now is investing in “AI placeholder” companies—tools that Vibe Coding can effortlessly replicate. Last week, a team demoed an AI-built, pro-grade photo-editing app in five minutes, and Adobe’s stock dipped. My friend showed me a joke on his phone: “Future programmer interview question: Describe your code in three sentences or less.”

On the way home, passing a McDonald’s, it hit me why IBM tanked. When even french fry oil temps are AI-optimized, the golden days of milking legacy code for maintenance fees are over. But watching AI-generated code declare Valentine’s Day as February 31st, I figured—at least this year, programmers can still enjoy the holidays in peace.