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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#181

Post by msephton »

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…

At this point I'd say that I'm 1000% more productive in the aspects that I use it for. I rarely hit any walls, and if I do its absolutely always down to an unclear or incomplete thought progress or lack of clarity in prompting.

Re: Vibe engineering

#182

Post by wferrell »

@simonw

Great post. I've thought about what I want for better Vibe Engineering:

Each agent needs to deliver a fully working App/URL/Build so the functionality can be tested & verified.

Today AI IDEs deliver the diff + an explanation. Excellent. But give me the full build, a build I can share. A build that represents what it would be like shipped. When it comes to user facing functionality, a real build is how product owners verify a feature is complete.

Learn from Vercel -

A key part of Vercel’s magic is the automatic deployments for each branch. When working on a project with per branch vercel deployments - a team gets the immediate value of:

Shareable work - now others can see/test/give feedback on the great new feature you’ve developed - and their only work is to click a link (not git pull a branch and attempt to run locally)

No more “it works on my machine”. It either works or it doesn’t.

Confidence that if released, you know exactly what the user will experience. Give me automatic deployments for each agent, for each PR. And keep them available to spin up / re-use later.

I want to be able to re-launch it 3 months later and it just works. The reason we don’t do this today is the cost of the engineering - but with docker et al + AI agents, the cost of the eng work drops 99%

Deliver the deployment in such a way that immediate feedback to the AI could be given. This way minor tweaks can be executed immediately by the AI meaning that I can just wait for the minor tweak, review and then merge. This means the PR gets shipped NOW.

Re: Vibe engineering

#183

Post by simonw »

maho wrote: post #175
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.

AAC / Agent Assisted Coding is a good term.

Re: Vibe engineering

#184

Post by IanCal »

what wrote: post #136
simonw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

That the tools do this kind of thing? They do, they’ll go through pretty long multi step processes to find things and edit them. They run tests, check output, see it’s wrong and go and add debug statements, rerun, try and fix things, rerun, then remove the logging.

Re: Vibe engineering

#185

Post by energy123 »

wferrell wrote: post #182

@simonw Great post. I've thought about what I want for better Vibe Engineering: Each agent needs to deliver a fully working App/URL/Build so the functionality can be tested & verified. Today AI IDEs deliver the diff + an explanation. Excellent. But give me the full build, a build I can share. A build that represents what it would be like shipped. When it comes to user facing functionality, a real build is how product…

I think a key skill is knowing what level of complexity a single run can realistically achieve, which is often only a small task and not a fully working build.

Re: Vibe engineering

#186

Post by mock-possum »

sarchertech wrote: post #130
nmilo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

“You’re absolutely right…”

Re: Vibe engineering

#187

Post by snickell »

maho wrote: post #175
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.

I really like "agent assisted coding". I think the word "vibe" is gonna always swing in a yolo direction, so having different words is helpful for differentiating fundamentally different applications of the same agentic coding tools.

Re: Vibe engineering

#188

Post by cutemonster »

maho wrote: post #175
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.

I like "YOLO vibe coding" or maybe "YOLO vibing" for short, if the context is clear :-)

Hmm another idea is "extreme vibe coding" as opposed to "extreme programming",

but those who did "extreme vibe coding" wouldn't know what it meant

Re: Vibe engineering

#189

Post by hollowonepl »

I’m glad to see that more and more articles and opinions about AI are focused on how it works and it works great just the process and mind thoughtfulness has to adapt and evolve to fully utilize the tool.

That’s so much better than wasting time on the frustrated who just negate without a meaningful try.

I share most of the experience and learning with the author, I just still don’t know how to name the whole process.

The whole vibe thing has already brought negativity into terminology because of all negating.

Closest thing in history of software engineering practice from the past is XP (Xstreme Programmimg) with its pair programming approach. It was a precursor of anything modern agile. Invented at the end of 90s

It’s just this time, my pair programming mate is computer instead of human person, but I treat it as junior to me and review, organize, while coding, testing, documenting is delegate and we jointly do the analysis as a part of the discussion.

I can agree, it’s strongly augmented experience and weird often to newcomers to adapt, but when a critical path to succeed is discovered, it works great and results are a blast!

Re: Vibe engineering

#190

Post by peteforde »

lkirkwood wrote: post #116
peteforde wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're using LLMs for a large number of arithmetic calculations, you're exactly the problem GP is talking about. If you absolutely must use AI get it to generate code that will perform the calculations instead, so that you can actually verify the result.

You're straining very hard to make your position sound reasonable, but your assumption that I both can't verify the values of the winning combination and wouldn't verify those values is simply not true.

In the example I cited, verifying a ratio isn't the hard part. It's running the dozens of permutations (smart) or hundreds of permutations (naive) that an LLM can do in 90 seconds that saves me hours of boring work. It's actually so repetitive that I'm likely to have made the same kind of mistakes you're alluding to.

As always, I end with encouragement: if you want to do everything the long and hard way, I'm not here to change your mind. You will have to stop being upset that others are moving much faster than you, though. It's a choice.

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