I just finished a PhD in stats, and before that, studied computer science. I had planned to go back to industry to do software engineering or be a data scientist afterwards.
However, it seems that in the meantime, vibe coding has taken over the software industry and swallowed most data scientist roles. Few open positions, and the ones that do exist are just pushing a button instead of thinking and solving problems. Is this a correct assessment? Should I try to get back in or just find a new career? I am not too keen on staying in academia either.


What I’ve seen appears to indicate some genuinely new approaches by the AI, rather than putting together existing information. That blog post, for example, quotes some running commentary from a mathematician studying the proof of the theorem that she had been working on for years:
Note that this particular proof is correct, according to that same mathematician.
The issue with longstanding problems such as these is that yes, they can be used to establish evidence of plagiarizing if your LLM is simply regurgitating stuff, but suppose you cannot come up with any… you don’t really know if it’s because this particular line of thought is new, or because you just hadn’t read about it.
That’s true even if you’re an expert practitioner; LLMs have been trained on All Of The Text and have superhuman recall after all.