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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#201

Post by senko »

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…

> 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.

I wonder what the practical limits are.

As a senior dev on a greenfield solo project it's too exhausting for me to have two parallel agents (front/back), most of the time they're waiting for me to spec, review or do acceptance test. Feels like sprinting, not something I could do day in and day out.

Might be due to tasks being too fine grained, but assuming larger ones are proportionally longer to spec and review, I don't see more than two (or, okay, three, maybe I'm just slow) being a realistic scenario.

More than that, I think we're firmly in the vibe coding (or maybe spec-driven vibe coding) territory.

Re: Vibe engineering

#202

Post by stpedgwdgfhgdd »

cadamsdotcom wrote: post #120

A better term is agentic coding, agentic software engineering, etc. rather than being vibe based. My process starts from a Claude Code plan, whose first step is to write a spec. I use TDD, and enforce my "unspoken rules of code quality" using a slew of generated tools. One tiny tool blocks code which violates our design system. Another tool blocks code which violates our separation of layering - this forces the HTTP…

+1

Re: Vibe engineering

#203

Post by solarwindy »

simonw wrote: post #180
bluefirebrand wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I’m finding that whether this process works well is a measure (and a function) of how well-factored and disciplined a codebase is in the first place. Funnily enough, LLMs do seem to have a better time extending systems that are well-engineered for extensibility.

That’s the part which gives me optimism, and even more enjoyment of the craft — that quality pays back so immediately, makes it that much easier to justify the extra effort, and having these tools at our disposal reduces the ‘activation energy’ for necessary re-work that may before have just seemed too monumental.

If a codebase is in a good shape for people to produce high-quality work, then so too can the machines. Clear, up-to-date, close-to-the-code, low redundancy documentation; self-documenting code and tests, that prioritizes expression of intent over cleverness; consistent patterns of abstraction that don’t necessitate jarring context switches from one area to the next; etc.

All this stuff is so much easier to lay down with an agent loaded up on the relevant context too.

Edit: oh, I see you said as much in the article :)

Re: Vibe engineering

#204

Post by EagnaIonat »

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…

> now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding.

News to me. AI-assisted coding is more auto-complete or having it trying to make sense of awful documentation.

Vibe coding to means a number of things.

- The person has no skill in understanding what the LLM wrote. - The code created hasn't been reviewed in any way to look for possible future issues. - Technical debt from the get go. - Legally your application is screwed.

For me the single killer of vibe coding is that anything the LLM creates cannot be protected/copyrighted. UK has some laws that might offer a little protection, but EU/US you are pretty much screwed.

Re: Vibe engineering

#205

Post by lemming »

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…

While this is true, I definitely find that the style of the work changes a lot. It becomes much more managerial, and less technical. I feel much more like a mix of project and people manager, but without the people. I feel like the jury is still out on whether I’m overall more productive, but I do feel like I have less fun.

Re: Vibe engineering

#206

Post by testfrequency »

The recent jokes about “everyone is an engineer” now just feels unprovable, where as before it felt like you could still counter that argument by asking to see someone’s code.

Now everyone has examples of code they’ve “written”, but nobody can explain what it does. Unless of course, their readme.md was also completely generated.

I agree with some of the people here that vibe engineering has completely deflated my long successful career as a SWE, and it’s pushed me mentally into non-tech roles to feel motivated.

Re: Vibe engineering

#207

Post by maybewhenthesun »

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…

You word quite well how I feel about it. On top of not really liking babysitting an AI , I'm also very afraid of the way this whole AI coding business normalizes needing an account with some nebulous evil empire to even be able to do your work. Brrr.

Re: Vibe engineering

#208

Post by maybewhenthesun »

I think it's a good idea to make the distinction. But I don't think 'vibe engineering' is the term I'd go for.

To me `vibe engineering` sounds like shoddily AI-designed suspension bridges. But then maybe I'm just an old fart programmer who thinks 'software engineering' is a term made up by programmers wanting to be as cool as bridge designers...

Re: Vibe engineering

#209

Post by csar »

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?

OP is one of the co-creators of Django (for which I am eternally grateful, having built my first company on top of it) and one of the most prolific writers in the space. I also happen to strongly agree with his assessment, though as he said getting that amount of value out of current tools is real work.

Re: Vibe engineering

#210

Post by baq »

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 experience you have is something most youngsters won't ever get, because they won't have the time. You've become more valuable than you used to be, because you know exactly what works when and what doesn't. The hard part is being able to find the joy in making agents do what you want achieved instead of building it yourself. I think it actually isn't too hard once you get up to speed with managing multiple agents - efficiently juggling them feels like an art performance sometimes.
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