August 2025
Intermediate to advanced
254 pages
7h 51m
English
Content preview from Beyond Vibe Coding
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Chapter 4. Beyond the 70%: Maximizing Human Contribution
You’ve seen how AI coding assistants like Cursor, Cline, Copilot, and Windsurf have transformed how software is built, shouldering much of the grunt work and boilerplate—about 70%.1 But what about that last “30%” of the job that separates a toy solution from a production-ready system? This gap includes the hard parts: understanding complex requirements, architecting maintainable systems, handling edge cases, and ensuring code correctness. In other words, while AI can generate code, it often struggles with engineering.
Tim O’Reilly, reflecting on decades of technology shifts, reminds us that each leap in automation has changed how we program but not why we need skilled programmers. We’re not facing the end of programming but rather “the end of programming as we know it today,” meaning developers’ roles are evolving, not evaporating.
The challenge for today’s engineers is to embrace AI for what it does best (the first 70%) while doubling down on the durable skills and insights needed for the remaining 30%. This article dives into expert insights to identify which human skills remain crucial. We’ll explore what senior and midlevel developers should continue to leverage and what junior developers must invest in to thrive alongside AI.
This chapter’s goal, then, is to offer you pragmatic guidance for maximizing the value of that irreplaceable 30%, with actionable takeaways for engineers at every level.
Senior Engineers and Developers: ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.