Automatic programming

antirez introduces "Automatic Programming" as his term for writing software with AI assistance — a practice he believes will soon simply be called "the process of writing software." He draws a sharp distinction from "vibe coding," which he defines as generating software using AI without being part of the process at all.

The key claim: automatic programming "produces vastly different results with the same LLMs depending on the human that is guiding the process." The human's intuition, design, continuous steering, and vision matter enormously.

In vibe coding, you describe things vaguely and the LLM produces whatever first design comes to mind; the vibe coder merely reports failures or mismatches with expectations. antirez urges readers: when you are genuinely engaged in production and understand what's happening, "remember: it is the software you are producing."

He acknowledges vibe coding has a place and democratizes software production. But automatic programming is producing high-quality software that "strictly follow[s] the producer's vision of the software" — from high-level design down to how specific functions are written — with AI as an assistant, not the driver.

The post closes with: "I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine... Programming is now automatic, vision is not (yet)."

He points to Redis as proof: technically unremarkable at its start (basic data structures and networking code any competent programmer could write), but it became hugely valuable "because of the ideas and visions it contained."