Yes, Vitalik and his team will be programming for ETC. Any work produced by them can and will be applied to ETC so long as it isn't code that censors transactions (ETC's primary criticism of ETH). Tone Vays explained this in the video by Chris Ellis posted above.  This is a major reason why it is likely ETC will stay around and may potentially grow much bigger than it is today.  The development team is ETH; it is not a rudderless ship as many claim.