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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#161

Post by scuff3d »

taylorlunt wrote: post #104

These 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…

There's a lot of annoying stuff it can do fairly well without many guardrails. It's a minor productivity boost but it's nice not to have to do.

Doc comments for example. Today I had it generate doc comments for a class I wrote. I had to go and fix every single one of them because it did some dumb shit, but it out all the scaffolding in place and got the basics there so it was a lot quicker.

I also used it to generate json schemas from Python a couple of Python classes the other day. Highly structured inputs, highly structured output, so there wasn't much for it to fuck up. Took care of the annoying busy work I didn't want to do (not that schemas are busy work, but this particular case was).

Still haven't seen a use case that justifies the massive cost, or all the blatant theft and copy right infringement, or the damage to the environment...

Re: Vibe engineering

#162

Post by hilti »

There will be times when LLMs are not accessible or working as expected and we will honor real software developers who can still think on their own, create and solve problems.

Re: Vibe engineering

#163

Post by scuff3d »

ares623 wrote: post #150
scuff3d wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope this is a joke...

Partially serious. I mean what’s the point of being able to open 100 PRs in one day if your coworkers can only reliably review 5 of them?

Not just that but PRs are about a lot more than syntactical correctness, it's also about design. Just this week we've had two PR catch bad design choices that came from a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem space. Even if the AI wrote perfect code the first time everytime it wouldn't matter in those cases.

Re: Vibe engineering

#164

Post by uzy777 »

handfuloflight wrote: post #140
waltbosz wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Aah, he must be prompting it wrong

Re: Vibe engineering

#165

Post by simonw »

subarctic wrote: post #151

I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it so…

I'm really sorry to hear this, because part of my goal here is to help push back against the idea that "programming skills are useless now, anyone can get an LLM to write code for them".

I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents. You can take everything you've learned up to this point and accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of tools.

I said a version of this in the post:

> AI tools amplify existing expertise. The more skills and experience you have as a software engineer the faster and better the results you can get from working with LLMs and coding agents.

A brand new vibe coder may be able to get a cool UI out of ChatGPT, but they're not going to be able to rig up a set of automated tests with continuous integration and continuous deployment to a Kubernetes cluster somewhere. They're also not going to be able to direct three different agents at once in different areas of a large project that they've designed the architecture for.

Re: Vibe engineering

#166

Post by Loic »

subarctic wrote: post #151

I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it so…

Do not worry, I am mentoring a young engineer in my team. It is painfully hard to get him to improve his code, because it works. It is badly structured, lot of small "impedance mismatches", lot of small security issues, all that in 3 Python files.

I have a team of 10 engineers, the quality of the code they produce together with the LLM of the day correlates even more with the experience.

My impression over the past 6 months - before we had no "official" access to LLM, is that they increase the gap between junior and experienced developers.

Note that this is my limited impression from a team of 10 engineers. This matches with Simon's feeling in a good way for you!

Re: Vibe engineering

#167

Post by apsurd »

subarctic wrote: post #151

I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it so…

The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies.

It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for.

But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I did and that's how I learned. And now in my second decade I switched to "why code anything?". In a business sense I mean, coding the thing is almost never the missing piece.

I joke in meetings that the answer is always "yes" whenever cross-functional teams ask "can we do this?". "How hard would x be?". For tech teams the answer _is_ always YES! I get that out of the way because that's never the right question to ask.

Re: Vibe engineering

#168

Post by simonw »

apsurd wrote: post #167
subarctic wrote: post #151

I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it so…

The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies. It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for. But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I di…

Absolutely this. LLM assistance means we can work faster, and that we can build things that previously weren't feasible given the available time and resources.

Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build? It doesn't matter how fast you can move if you're consistently solving the wrong problems.

Re: Vibe engineering

#169

Post by fifilura »

apsurd wrote: post #167
subarctic wrote: post #151

I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it so…

The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies. It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for. But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I di…

Yes. The first programmers used computers as a necessity to get things done. Difficult mathematical calculations, a fancy control system.

This is where we should be. Using computers to solve problems. Not just "doing programming".

Raise your head, look towards the horizon.

Re: Vibe engineering

#170

Post by tabbott »

I predict that people will end up using the term "vibe engineering" to refer to development processes that involve asking an LLM to build their entire app: UI design, database schema, architecture, devops, QA, debugging, etc, without any of the careful effort to understand and be able to proudly own the resulting code that Simon is imagining.

And I think that is actually the most natural meaning for "vibe engineering", actually: Parallel to "vibe coding" where you serially prompt the AI to write the code for you, "vibe engineering" should be serially prompting the AI to do the entire engineering process for you.

I also predict that a precisely defined term for what Simon is describing will inevitably end up being primarily used by people who are actually doing "vibe engineering". Being disciplined and careful is hard.

People and organizations love to claim/pretend they're doing expensive, mostly invisible work like "building secure software". Given nearly every organization claims they use security best practices no matter what their actual practices, I imagine it will be that way with "actually reading and verifying what the LLM generated for me".

Certainly I've been disappointed how often someone presents something they've "written" in recent months that turns out, on inspection, to be AI slop that the "author" hasn't even read every sentence of carefully.

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