Can we please just call it model driven development? I already hated the distortion of "vibe" as it got distorted from Karpathy's original meaning.
Vibe engineering
131–140 of 759 posts
Re: Vibe engineering
#132When 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.
gotta source or two? it's an ungooglable topic due to "see pigeon do funny dance" social media spam
Re: Vibe engineering
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 C…
I think the thing people have to understand is how fast the value proposition is changing. There is a lot of conversation about "plateauing" model performance, but the actual experience from the combination of the model and tooling changes is night and day in the last 3 months. It was beginning to be very useful with Claude 3.7 in the spring this year, but we have just gone through a step function change.
I was decomissioning some code and I made the mistake of asking for an "exhaustive" analysis of the areas I needed to remove. Sonnet 4.5 took 30 minutes looking around and compiling a detailed report on exactly what needed to be removed from this very very brownfield project and after I reviewed the report, it one shot the decommisioning of the code (in this case I was using CLaude in the Cursor tooling at work). It was overkill, but impressive how well it mapped all the ramifications in the code base by greping around.
Re: Vibe engineering
#134I think we should just accept that vibe-coding has now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding. Actually, it makes sense to me even when a human is interacting directly with the code, because it feels a lot like pair-programming. As such, I really am "vibing" with the AI.
But then the original meaning of vibe-coding -- as in, "Take the wheel, LLama of God" -- does need a new term, because that will also be a lasting phenomenon. I propose "Yolo-Coding" -- It fits in nicely with the progression of No-Code, Low-Code, Yolo-Code.
Re: Vibe engineering
#135"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.
Then it turns out that your CI gates are green because your tests are all subtly broken, the code you've been reviewing doesn't matter and the code you haven't been reviewing is what's broken in production. You learn from that and rebuild the universe, but now you're compute-limited from rebuilding your agents to deal with the underlying issue in your tooling and you have to dig yourself out of a hole you dug with a large derrick using nothing but a shovel.
Re: Vibe engineering
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 C…
I guess we just have to take your word for this, which is somewhat odd considering most of your comments link back to some artifact of yours. Are you paid by any of these companies?
Re: Vibe engineering
#137When 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.
gotta source or two? it's an ungooglable topic due to "see pigeon do funny dance" social media spam
Google Skinner Pigeons.
“One bird was conditioned to turn counter-clockwise about the cage, making two or three turns between reinforcements. Another repeatedly thrust its head into one of the upper corners of the cage. A third developed a 'tossing' response, as if placing its head beneath an invisible bar and lifting it repeatedly. Two birds developed a pendulum motion of the head and body, in which the head was extended forward and swung from right to left with a sharp movement followed by a somewhat slower return.”
“The experiment might be said to demonstrate a sort of superstition. The bird behaves as if there were a causal relation between its behavior and the presentation of food, although such a relation is lacking.”
Re: Vibe engineering
#138I think we should just accept that vibe-coding has now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding. Actually, it makes sense to me even when a human is interacting directly with the code, because it feels a lot like pair-programming. As such, I really am "vibing" with the AI. But then the original meaning of vibe-coding -- as in, "Take the wheel, LLama of God" -- does need a new term, because that will also b…
What about slop-coding?
Re: Vibe engineering
#139I think we should just accept that vibe-coding has now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding. Actually, it makes sense to me even when a human is interacting directly with the code, because it feels a lot like pair-programming. As such, I really am "vibing" with the AI. But then the original meaning of vibe-coding -- as in, "Take the wheel, LLama of God" -- does need a new term, because that will also b…
What about slop-coding?
Nice
Re: Vibe engineering
#140These 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…
My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it. But if I give it a code example that was written by humans and ask it to explain the code, it gives pretty good explanations. It's also good for questions like "I'm trying to accomplish complicated task XYZ that I've never done before, what should I do?", and it will give code samples that get me on the right path.…
> My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect.
Have you isolated if you're properly honing in on the right breadth of context for the planned implementation?