It's just engineering, or coding or what every your current discipline is.
We didnt stop calling them Framers or Finish Carpenters when they got electric saws and nail guns.
Tooling does not change the job requirements.
Vibe engineering
31–40 of 759 posts
Re: Vibe engineering
#32"Vibe coding" sounds too good. Catchy, ridiculous and still cool. It'd be hard to beat. It's a genius move from Andrej Karpathy.
Different strokes I guess. I've always thought it sounded pretty stupid (right up there with asshat and awesomesauce). Conjures up an image of the Big Lebowski writing code while listening to a cheech & chong album.
Yes, that exactly. If you have to read the code or the manual, you’re not vibe coding. I think vibe coding is super good for the industry and people in general.
Re: Vibe engineering
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I’d say what you’re doing is architecting, like the old term for “software architect”. Those are professional who know how to design a system from a high level and have the experience to judge a good implementation of it but they themselves do not write the code.
Likewise real world architects have the skills to design a building but do not care or know how to build it, relying on engineers for that.
I think it’s important to distinguish because we’re increasingly seeing a trend towards final product over production, meaning these “vibe” people want the tool in the end and consider the steps in between to be just busywork and AI can do for them.
That’s closer to product design than to engineering. If I can imagine Monalisa and write that thought to paper, communicating that thought and getting a painter to paint it for me does not make me Da Vinci.
Re: Vibe engineering
#34I think this is a pointless distinction tbh. Either you're getting good results from AI or you're not. If you're not, you should probably rethink your approach.
I'd offer a new term: curmudgeon coding. This pre-dates LLMs and is the act of engineers endlessly clutching pearls over new technology and its branding. It's a reflexive reaction to marketing hype mixed with a conservative by default attitude. Think hating on "NoSQL". Validity of said hate aside, it's definitely "a type" of developer who habitually engages in whinging.
Re: Vibe engineering
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Hmmm, I think it’s a bit paradoxical to try to come up with a fun term to encourage the spread of the concept, as the concept itself is quite dull by definition. It’s just software engineering. Boring process stuff where you do a bunch of other things around the ‘building’ part that lets you scale up with quality. Vibe is about fun and go-with-the-flow. This isn’t that. It should connote pocket protectors, not sunglasses. Right?
Clearly I’m not in marketing.
Regardless, I’m delighted that this has gotten people to ‘independently discover’ software engineering best practices on their own.
Re: Vibe engineering
#36I could never take anything seriously with the word "vibe" prefixed. "Engineering" is something hard, vigorous, fully dedicated, and commanding respect. It's just a stark contrast to "vibing something out of thin air"
Re: Vibe engineering
#37Frankly the most accurate way I would describe what I do with AI is managed programming, or being a handler for the AI.
The only issue with "Handled Programming" is I don't like how it fits for a name.
Vibe is much too unserious to pass my check for a way of professionally doing something and it also does not reflect the level of engagement I have with the AI and code since I'm putting together specs and otherwise deeply engaging with the model to produce the output I want.
Re: Vibe engineering
#38I’d just call it “coding” – it’ll be the default soon enough. For the old way: “hand-coding”
It will certainly be the default for cases where it's easier to read code than to write code, but this is far from universally true. AFAIK, Joel Spolsky was the first to discuss this at length 25 years ago [0], but numerous people have echoed his sentiment [1, 2, 3, ...]
One of the most underrated skills in effectively using gen-AI for coding is knowing ahead of time whether it will take longer to carefully review the code it produces, versus writing it from scratch yourself.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
[1] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it
[2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/
[3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-har...
[...] https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+harder+to+read+code+t...
Re: Vibe engineering
#39I feel using the word 'vibe' is inherently giving it a negative connotation which goes against the idea presented here. The reality is the tools are really useful when used as tools, like a power drill vs. a screw driver. Vibing implies backseat driving which isn't what using the tools proficiently is like. The better term would be 'assisted' or 'offloaded'. Same thing with the term 'engineering'. That's a fairly new…
If you're paid to use science and math to create things that didn't exist before, then guess what: you're an engineer.
Just don't capitalize it in Oregon.
Re: Vibe engineering
#40"Vibe coding" implies it's newbies throwing prompts and hoping some of them stick. For the experienced lot of us, I've heard many call it "hyper engineering"
I put a lot of thought in to my prompts. I can code, definitely not as good as the AI or people here on HN; it's something I always enjoyed doing to tinker with things.
The AI agent in Cursor with Gemini (I'm semi-new to all of this) is legit.
I can try things out and see for myself and get new ideas for things. Mostly I just ask it to do things, it does it; for specific things I just highlight it in the editor and say "Do it this way instead" or "for every entry in the loop, add to variable global_var only if the string matches ./cfg/strings.json" I _KNOW_ I can code that.
But I like my little clippy.