Vibe engineering

No one should be allowed to use "engineering" in the context of producing something with LLMs until they learn to say "No, I'll not help you cut corners on this, and if you persist I will report you".

If you're fine with an AI designed bridge, where the builder tweaked the prompt to get the LLM to suggest cutting out all safety features, then okay, go with vibe engineering.

Around the time GPT-4 was released in early 2023, a similar issue arose with another profession: translation. It was at that point that machine translation between languages like English and Japanese (the language pair I have worked with) started to approach human level for the first time.

I took part in a lot of discussions then with other professional translators, and the reaction of many was similar to that of some of the commenters here: not only were they discouraged because their hard-earned language and translation skills no longer seemed needed, but using LLMs as assistants took the enjoyable challenge out of the translation process.

Nearly everyone I spoke with then worked from home as a freelancer, carefully crafting one translation at a time. They didn’t like the idea of becoming managers of large-scale translation projects, even if it meant they would be able to apply their higher-order intercultural communication skills.

I do only a little professional translation myself now, but I try to keep up with AI developments and I often use translation tasks to test the latest models and frameworks. Over the past few months, I have vibe-coded some multi-LLM translation systems where texts were passed through multiple models that checked, critiqued, and improved each other’s translations. For the texts I tried them on, the results were much better than any single-LLM translation, approaching the level of the very best human translation. The API calls weren’t cheap, but for high-stakes translations such a system would more than pay for itself.

When designing that “vibe translation” system, I did apply my experience as a translator, similarly to what Simon is recommending programmers do now with vibe engineering. At this stage in my life (I’m sixty-eight), I am fine with that. But if LLMs had arrived when I was, say, just five or ten years into my translation career and still proud of my nuts-and-bolts skills, I might very well have looked for another career rather than becoming a vibe translator.

And in my experience, it always comes down to "you're holding it wrong" or "that LLM is older than 20 minutes."

Don't worry about it. Don't let anyone else tell you how best to use AI, use AI in a way that suits YOU, then it is so much fun. I would go crazy if I had multiple streams simultaneously working on stuff that need constant supervision (that would be different if I could trust they do 100% what I intend them to do), but AI is still very helpful in other ways (research, exploration, and writing tests).