Vibe engineering

I've been thinking about AI-assisted development for a while; I've tried out Claude's pro plan, Gemini Pro and many "top models" and I must say, this is going to create a chasm for junior/intermediate developers like myself, senior engineers reached to the point they are through deliberate practice-- interrogating code, making and breaking assertions, reading through the documentation or actually comprehending the code through the debugger or mental models. I don't "need" to do any of this. I can have an AI just spoon-feed me a large codebase in "ELI5" language, I can ask an AI about the best practices, I can have an AI look something up for me, synthesize it and wrap it up nicely for my mind to consume (equivalent to how hyper-processed junk food isn't good for our bodies either)

It's intellectual slop. It will get the job done (atleast for a while) but without the actual growth that comes along with it. When I use an AI to one-shot a "small one-off script" I don't learn anything from it (when as a relatively new developer I SHOULD be learning something from it) And this is unlike stack overflow or googling becuase you can turn off your mind, just become one of those drones from Wall-E.

I make a point to avoid using any AI for coding (even for looking things up) when working on personal projects, at the cost of "productivty" and "efficiency" , but I get to retain my humanity and soul in programming.

Sorry if this sounds cheesy, it's just I care deeply about code craftsmanship from my end, to see that skill be diminished to an random number generator? Yeah No.

I can totally relate, very similar situation here.

I am currently kind of an anti-AI black sheep in engineering department because I refuse to fully embrace the exponentials and give in to the vibes.

I avoid burnout by simply switching off my brain from all this noise about vibe coding - i have thought hard and long, i know the way this is being implemented is wrong, i know they will create problems for themselves down the road (they already have, the signs are already there), i will be here to dig them out when the time comes.

So far I don't see anyone shipping faster or better with AI than I can manually, so I'm good.

GitHub's SpecKit is an example: https://github.com/github/spec-kit

Spec-Driven Development treats the spec as the source of truth and the code as an artifact. As you develop, you modify/add to the spec and the codebase gets updated to reflect it.

Personally I'm doubtful it can compete with traditional artisanal software engineering, as it's (IMHO) boils down to "if only you can spec it precisely enough, it'll work" and we've tried this with 5GL and (to some extent) BDD, and it doesn't get you to 100%.

I do think it's interesting enough to explore, and most of us could use a bit more details in our Jira tickets.

It is just a new way of coding. And indeed what the blog post said, if you are experienced, you will benefit the most as the AI agent will make similar mistakes as a junior and you will be able to recognize them.

But indeed, the fun part of coding a couple of routines is gone. That is history.

I don't buy your last sentence at all.

AGENTS.md is just a place to put stuff you don't want to tell LLMs over and over again. They're not magical instructions LLMs follow 100% of the time, they don't carry any additional importance over what you put into the prompt manually. Your carefully curated AGENTS.md is only really useful at the very beginning of the conversation, but the longer the conversation gets, the less important those tokens on the top are. Somewhere around 100k tokens AGENTS.md might as well not exit, I constantly have to "remind it" of the very first paragraph there.

Go start a conversation and contradict what's written in AGENTS.md half way through the problem. Which of the two contradicting statements will take preference? The latter one! Therefore, all the time you've spent curating your AGENTS.md is the time you've wasted thinking you're "teaching" LLMs anything.