Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 759 posts

Re: Vibe engineering

#61

Post by DowsingSpoon »

chucknthem wrote: post #56

Funny I'm a professional engineer and happily call myself "vibe coding" when writing code these days, it started as tongue in cheek, but now I've embraced it. Being good at vibe coding is just being good at coding, the best practices still apply. I don't feel we need another term for it. It'll just be how almost everyone writes code in the future. Just like using an IDE.

If you’re looking at the AI-generated output then you’re not Vibe Coding. Period. Let’s not dilute and destroy the term just as it’s beginning to become a useful label.

Re: Vibe engineering

#62

Post by est »

drchaim wrote: post #15

I’d just call it “coding” – it’ll be the default soon enough. For the old way: “hand-coding”

Linus Torvalds: 'Talk is cheap. Show me the code'

Today: 'code is cheap, show me the talk'

Re: Vibe engineering

#63

Post by vibefeelsgood »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #45
flakiness wrote: post #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.

Except that we're not going to be "coding" very soon. We're going to be firing off jobs that get tracked in VCS, gated through CI, then reviewed by a panel of agents with different specialties. At the end you'll have a few select sections of code that these agents flagged for human review, and thousands of lines of stuff that you don't need to worry about.

This guy selling AI snake oil btw. In case it wasn't obvious.

Re: Vibe engineering

#64

Post by phs318u »

layer8 wrote: post #21
simonw wrote: post #2

Just 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.

We can resurrect CASE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engine... “casing”?

CAISE? Computer Aided Intelligent Software Engineering

Re: Vibe engineering

#65

Post by metadat »

I've been all-in on vibe engineering for 4 months now and it is overall amazing. Simon missed a few key rules and practices that I follow, but every one of the points he hit is spot on. I also know for a fact the work I do has influenced some of his recent writing. Sorry to be a braggy jerk but I'm pretty proud of this! The part about past management experience being a key skill surprised me but now it makes sense.

I really do usually have 3 different projects in flight for at least 6 hours a day. I'd write a blog post but I keep expecting someone else will write the essential same post tomorrow. :)

p.s. The first 2 months was exhausting but now it's slightly less exhausting. Make no mistake, it is an extreme transition to make.

Re: Vibe engineering

#67

Post by simonw »

metadat wrote: post #65

I've been all-in on vibe engineering for 4 months now and it is overall amazing. Simon missed a few key rules and practices that I follow, but every one of the points he hit is spot on. I also know for a fact the work I do has influenced some of his recent writing. Sorry to be a braggy jerk but I'm pretty proud of this! The part about past management experience being a key skill surprised me but now it makes sense. I…

What extra processes would you include? I'm sure my list in the post isn't exhaustive!

Re: Vibe engineering

#68

Post by MontyCarloHall »

iahds9uasd wrote: post #60
drchaim wrote: post #15

I’d just call it “coding” – it’ll be the default soon enough. For the old way: “hand-coding”

I feel nauseous when I read comments like this. Does no one here actually like programming?

I don't like the kind of programming that an LLM can easily accomplish.

For instance, I recently had to replace a hard-coded parameter with something specifiable on the command line, in an unfamiliar behemoth of a Java project. The hard-coded value was literally 20 function calls deep in a heavily dependency-injected stack, and the argument parser was of course bespoke.

Claude Code oneshotted this in about 30 seconds. It took me all of 5 minutes to read through its implementation and verify that it correctly called the custom argument parser and percolated its value down all 20 layers of the stack. The hour of my time I got back from having to parse through all those layers myself was spent on the sort of programming I love, the kind that LLMs are bad at: things like novel algorithm development, low-level optimizations, designing elegant and maintainable code architecture, etc.

Re: Vibe engineering

#69

Post by wilsonnb3 »

drchaim wrote: post #15

I’d just call it “coding” – it’ll be the default soon enough. For the old way: “hand-coding”

I dunno, I feel lately like we are right at the tail end of the honeymoon era and about to enter the era where the blog topic du jour is “use LLMs, not too much, mostly on a short leash”.

Not much to base that on other than vibes, though :)

Re: Vibe engineering

#70

Post by bigiain »

peteforde wrote: post #11

My issue with this term is that it muddies the waters for people who are using LLMs to assist with types of engineering beyond just writing code. I've used GPT to rapidly get up to speed with just about every aspect of circuit design, CAD, CNC... the list is long. Coding is often involved in most of these domains now, but if everything is assumed to be code-first, it leaves people who are doing different work with a…

> My issue with this term is that it muddies the waters for people who are using LLMs to assist with types of engineering beyond just writing code.

I'm now imagining me dying as a vibe-engineered truck has a steering/brake failure and crashes into me sending flying through the vibe-engineered papier-mâché bridge guardrails, and feeling sweet sweet release as I plummet to my doom.

Post reply on HN