AI coding is to 2026 what C was to 1973

Nick Baumann:

But perhaps the most relevant historical parallel to today's "vibe coding" debate happened in 1973. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson decided to rewrite Unix in a new language called C. The idea of writing an entire operating system in a high-level language was considered absurd.

Critics argued:

1. It would be too slow
2. You'd lose control over the hardware
3. The added complexity would make the system unmaintainable

Instead, C's abstraction of machine details enabled Unix to become one of the most portable and influential operating systems ever created. As Thompson later noted: "Unix is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."