The story everyone's telling is that AI killed the coder. That "anyone can build software now" and the four decade run of programming as a craft is over. The story is backwards. What actually happened is the opposite. The act of making AI do something useful has quietly turned into coding . The skills didn't die. They migrated. The Fake Dichotomy The pitch was: people who don't code will leapfrog those who do, because you can "just ask the AI." What happened in practice: those people hit a wall the moment they need the same output twice . The coders didn't. Why? Because every instinct a coder has is exactly what it takes to make an LLM produce something reliable: Decompose the problem. Name the variables. Version the change. Test the edge case. Refactor when it gets ugly. Prompting without those instincts is vibes. Prompting with them is programming. Structure Is the Coder's Native Language, and LLMs Reward It The prompts that work aren't the eloquent ones.…