I don't know about that. If a non-engineer is able to replicate your "serious" project from scratch as a "pet project" then perhaps it is not serious in the first place?
> So what they are missing is a platform to easily deploy and maintain their projects, much like a "normal" developer would.Right now it's quite tedious to set up this scaffolding, but it's absolutely possible with AGENTS.md, skills and rigid hollistic tests. Once done, non-technical people can continue developing independently without hiring any software engineers by simply telling claude/codex what they want.
You should already know that maintenance is never free. The big question is are they making money out of it to justify that maintenance?
Maybe it has replaced people that build useless pet projects that make no money, especially internal tools such as dashboards. But again once an incident arrives is when you need someone to untangle that vibe coded mess as it grows in complexity.