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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#171

Post by bluefirebrand »

selcuka wrote: post #153
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…

Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.

Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please?

The reason we invest this time in Junior devs is so they improve. LLMs do not

Re: Vibe engineering

#172

Post by buu700 »

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 love programming, but it turns out I love building useful stuff even more than I love programming. Agentic coding helped me fall in love with development all over again. If a team of junior engineers suddenly showed up at my door and offered to perform any tasks I was willing to assign to them for the rest of my life, I'd love that too.

Agentic coding is just doing for development what cloud computing did for systems administration. Sure, I could spend all day building and configuring Linux boxes to deploy backend infrastructure on if the time and budget existed for me to do that, and I'd have fun doing it, but what's more fun for me is actually launching a product.

Re: Vibe engineering

#173

Post by sph »

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…

Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years.

But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line committed or have to compete with "vibe coding" KPIs.

Re: Vibe engineering

#175

Post by maho »

keeda wrote: post #134

I 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…

At $enterprise, we were just looking for a proper term that sets "responsible vibing" apart from "YOLO vibe coding". We landed on "agent assisted coding".

It's a bit more technical. And it has a three-letter acronym. Gotta have a three letter acronym.

Re: Vibe engineering

#176

Post by leptons »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #171
selcuka wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.

Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? The reason we invest this time in Junior devs is so they improve. LLMs do not

"AI" has been so inconsistent. On one day it anticipates almost every line I am coding, the next day it's like we've never worked together before.

Re: Vibe engineering

#177

Post by dpacmittal »

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 can relate with you. I love programming and building things, gives a different kind of rush when you finally figure out something. I've done vibe coding and don't enjoy it at all. I always thought my love for coding gives me an edge over other engineers who just want to get the job done. Now it's holding me back and I'm not sure if I should continue working in this field or if start doing wood working or something.

Re: Vibe engineering

#178

Post by jmspring »

simonw wrote: post #165
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 too…

I need to read through this some more, but there has been another genetic coding paradigm referred to as spec driven development.

I’ll find the link in the morning, but I kinda joke - it’s vibe coding for people who know how to define a problem and iterate on it.

I’ve got a project reimplementing a service I want to make more uniform. Claude has produced a lot of stuff that would have taken me weeks to do.

Re: Vibe engineering

#179

Post by sciencejerk »

peteforde wrote: post #86
bigiain wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's easy to confuse cynicism for humor. Look, if you enjoy calculating a table of dozens of resistor value combinations for a feedback network that prefers reels you have on your PnP, you keep knocking yourself out.

Why can't it be both cynical and humorous? I personally got a good laugh from the paper-mache guardrails visualization

Re: Vibe engineering

#180

Post by simonw »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #171
selcuka wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.

Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? The reason we invest this time in Junior devs is so they improve. LLMs do not

I had a fascinating conversation about this the other day. An engineer was telling me about his LLM process, which is effectively this:

1. Collaborate on a detailed spec

2. Have it implement that spec

3. Spend a lot of time on review and QA - is the code good? Does the feature work well?

4. Take lessons from that process and write them down for the LLM to use next time - using CLAUDE.md or similar

That last step is the interesting one. You're right: humans improve, LLMs don't... but that means it's on us as their users to manage the improvement cycle by using every feature iteration as as opportunity to improve how they work.

I've heard similar things from a few people now: by constantly iterating on their CLAUDE.md - adding extra instructions every time the bot makes a mistake, telling it to do things like always write the tests first, run the linter, reuse the BaseView class when building a new application view, etc - they get wildly better results over time.

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