Vibe engineering
simonwillison.net
Vibe engineering
1–10 of 759 posts
Re: Vibe engineering
#2Just added this note to the end, as part of my justification for picking such an obviously stupid term for this:
> I’ve tried in the past to get terms like AI-assisted programming to stick, with approximately zero success. May as well try rubbing some vibes on it and see what happens.
Re: Vibe engineering
#3Just added this note to the end, as part of my justification for picking such an obviously stupid term for this: > I’ve tried in the past to get terms like AI-assisted programming to stick, with approximately zero success. May as well try rubbing some vibes on it and see what happens.
Seems like most of the benefit of "vibe engineering" in your description comes from using straightforward best practices of software engineering. How much does the AI add if you already have solid procedures in place for everything else the AI needs not to go bonkers?
Re: Vibe engineering
#4Just added this note to the end, as part of my justification for picking such an obviously stupid term for this: > I’ve tried in the past to get terms like AI-assisted programming to stick, with approximately zero success. May as well try rubbing some vibes on it and see what happens.
Seems like most of the benefit of "vibe engineering" in your description comes from using straightforward best practices of software engineering. How much does the AI add if you already have solid procedures in place for everything else the AI needs not to go bonkers?
The AI adds a ton. It really is like having a whole team of extra coders available, all of which can type faster than you.
Getting good results out of that team is hard, because the bottleneck is how quickly you can review their workflow and point them in new directions.
Understanding techniques like TDD, CI, linting, specification writing, research spikes etc turns out to be key to unlocking that potential. That's why experienced software engineers have such a big advantage, if they choose to use it.
Re: Vibe engineering
#5Thank you for writing this, Simon. I'm using an anonymous account not tied to my main one, so if the mods want to delete it, go ahead, but I really need to rant. My company has been taking this same approach for the past two months. While the rest of the world is warning about the effects of vibe coding and AI-slop, we're fully embracing it, calling it "working smart" and "automate all things!"
It's utterly ridiculous. It feels like the PMs and higher-ups have no idea how much tech debt we're creating right now. For the past few weeks, going to work has felt like going back to school, everyone's showing off their "homework", and whoever has the coolest vibecoded instructions.md or pipeline gets promoted.
I'm slowly burning out, and I was one of the people who actually liked the technology behind all this.
Re: Vibe engineering
#6Thank you Simon! Too many people conflate non-engineer vibe coding with engineers using ai to make themselves much more productive. We need different terms!
Re: Vibe engineering
#7I think this complements in a good way with "context engineering"[1], that's great.
[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/context-engineering/
Re: Vibe engineering
#8Vibe engineering is what vibe coders think they do.
Re: Vibe engineering
#9"Vibe coding" sounds too good. Catchy, ridiculous and still cool. It'd be hard to beat. It's a genius move from Andrej Karpathy.
Re: Vibe engineering
#10I am mildly disappointed
I was hoping that "vibe engineering" was going to be designing g bridges in the same way people think they can build apps with vibe coding
That would be alarming