there is no such thing as vibe engineering no matter how much you want to make it up
Vibe engineering
121–130 of 759 posts
Re: Vibe engineering
#122Funny 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.
> Being good at vibe coding is just being good at coding, the best practices still apply.
How does "vibe coding" embody "best practices" as the industry generally defines the latter term?
As I understand the phrase "vibe coding", it implies focusing solely on LLM prompt formulation and not the specifics of the generated source.
> It'll just be how almost everyone writes code in the future. Just like using an IDE.
The flaw with this analogy is that a qualified developer does not require an IDE in order to be able to do their job.
Re: Vibe engineering
#123These seem like a lot of great ways to work around the limitations of LLMs. But I'm curious what people here think. Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs? I see how if you can't really code, or you're new to a domain, then it can make a huge difference getting you started, but if you know what you're doing I find you hit a wall pretty quickly trying to…
I don’t think people are good at self-reporting the “boost” it gives them.
We need more empirical evidence. And historically we’re really bad at running such studies and they’re usually incredibly expensive. And the people with the money aren’t interested in engineering. They generally have other motives for allowing FUD and hype about productivity to spread.
Personally I don’t see these tools going much further than where they are now. They choke on anything that isn’t a greenfield project and consistently produce unwanted results. I don’t know what magic incantations and combinations of agents people have got set up but if that’s what they call “engineering,” these days I’m not sure that word has any meaning anymore.
Maybe these tools will get there one day but don’t go holding your breath.
Re: Vibe engineering
#124These seem like a lot of great ways to work around the limitations of LLMs. But I'm curious what people here think. Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs? I see how if you can't really code, or you're new to a domain, then it can make a huge difference getting you started, but if you know what you're doing I find you hit a wall pretty quickly trying to…
I don’t think people are good at self-reporting the “boost” it gives them. We need more empirical evidence. And historically we’re really bad at running such studies and they’re usually incredibly expensive. And the people with the money aren’t interested in engineering. They generally have other motives for allowing FUD and hype about productivity to spread. Personally I don’t see these tools going much further than…
> They choke on anything that isn’t a greenfield project and consistently produce unwanted results.
That was true 8 months ago. It's not true today, because of the one-two punch of modern longer-context "reasoning" models (Claude 4+, GPT-5+) and terminal-based coding agents (Claude Code, Codex CLI).
Setting those loose an an existing large project is a very different experience from previous LLM tools.
I've watched Claude Code use grep to find potential candidates for a change I want to make, then read the related code, follow back the chain of function calls, track down the relevant tests, make a quick detour to fetch the source code of a dependency directly from GitHub (by guessing the URL to the raw file) in order to confirm a detail, make the change, test the change with an ad-hoc "python -c ..." script, add a new automated test, run the tests and declare victory.
That's a different class entirely from what GPT-4o was able to do.
Re: Vibe engineering
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. Replacing a single hard-coded parameter with a command line argument is hardly an earth shattering change. It's trivial to verify that the argument properly gets passed down the stack (and that passing it has no side-effects), but figuring out that stack in the first place would have taken a much longer time. Think of it like an NP-complete problem: hard to solve, but easy to check that a solution is correct. Fo…
> It's trivial to verify that the argument properly gets passed down the stack It's not so trivial to verify that the change doesn't cause problems elsewhere, where it also should have been propagated.
Sorry if I haven't been clear: it's one variable, used exactly once at the very bottom of the call stack. The change only required adding a corresponding extra argument or class member to all of the functions/classes upstream. In fact, there were other variables in the caller of the bottom function that get passed down from the command line, a pattern that the LLM likely picked up on (and exactly what clued me in to the fact that the LLM would likely make this change very easily, a hunch that proved correct).
You raise a good point: an important skill in effectively using LLMs for coding is both being able to recognize ahead of time that cases like this are indeed simple, but also recognizing after the fact that the code is more complex than you initially realized and you can't easily internalize the (side) effects of what the LLM wrote, warranting a closer look.
Re: Vibe engineering
#126These seem like a lot of great ways to work around the limitations of LLMs. But I'm curious what people here think. Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs? I see how if you can't really code, or you're new to a domain, then it can make a huge difference getting you started, but if you know what you're doing I find you hit a wall pretty quickly trying to…
For stuff that I’m good at? Not even 10%.
For stuff that I’m bad at? Probably more than 1000%. I’ve used it to make a web app, write some shader code, and set up some rtc streaming from unreal engine to the browser. I doubt I would have done them at all otherwise tbh. I just don’t have the energy and interest to conclude that those particular ventures were good uses of my time.
Re: Vibe engineering
#127When pigeons are offered random rewards from a treat dispenser, they start doing all kinds of funny little dances and movements because they think the rewards are in response to their actions.
Funny dances like "writing tests" and "planning"
Re: Vibe engineering
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel nauseous when I read comments like this. Does no one here actually like programming?
Sadly the times where people joined software engineering for passion are way behind. People nowadays join just for the money or because it has lot of jobs available. It is very easy to notice at work who actually likes building software and wants to make the best product and who is there for the money, wants to move on, hard code something and get away with the minimal amount of work, usually because they don't care…
Or some of us are Engineers who very much enjoy solving problems using the best tool available.
Re: Vibe engineering
#129Centaur Coding.
Re: Vibe engineering
#130When pigeons are offered random rewards from a treat dispenser, they start doing all kinds of funny little dances and movements because they think the rewards are in response to their actions.
Funny dances like "writing tests" and "planning"
Robot, you must follow the rules of the house!
It is imperative that you do not kill me when delivering my breakfast!
You must not make your own doors by punching holes in the wall!
It is critical that you remember that humans cannot regrow limbs!