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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#251

Post by ReptileMan »

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 were never paid to type. You were paid to solve problems. And big part of this is being able to ask the right questions and framing of the problems. The rest were just tools.

There are exceptions of course - where you need to squeeze wonders from the hardware - but the majority of dev works boils to understanding the problem and finding the right answers.

Re: Vibe engineering

#252

Post by citeguised »

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…

Yes and especially with new developments, like "$Framework now has Signals!", my thought is "I don't really care since in some years, it won't matter anyways". I don't see how I can build this lower level knowledge by almost never actually using it. I don't even want to think about job-interviews after a year+ of vibing and then being asked how RxJS works.

I'm preparing mentally for my day-job to stop being fun (it still beats most other occupations I guess), and keep my side/hobby-projects strictly AI-free, to keep my sanity and prevent athropy.

I just hope we'll get out of this weird limbo at some time, where AI is too good to ignore, but too unreliable to be left alone. I don't want to deal with two pressures at work.

Re: Vibe engineering

#254

Post by shafyy »

saulpw wrote: post #222
simonw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 appreciate what you're trying to do, but for myself, I'm not depressed because my skills are less valuable. I enjoyed the money but it was never about that for me. I'm depressed because I don't like the way this new coding feels in my brain. My focus and attention are my most precious resources and vibe coding just shatters them. I want to be absorbed in a coding flow where I see all the levels of the system and ca…

How beautifully put, and I couldn't agree more. I feel exactly the same way.

However, I am still unconvinced that software development will go down this way. But if woking as a software developer will require managing multiple agents at the same time instead of crafting your own code — you can count me out, too.

Re: Vibe engineering

#255

Post by zwnow »

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…

What about the accessibility of software development? Its completely vanishing for people that can not afford to pay for these agents. It used to be a field where you could get a laptop from the scrapyard and learn from there. It feels pointless. Also agents do not invent things, the creativity part is gone with them. They simply use what they've already seen, repeat the same mistakes a person made a few years ago. Its a dystopian way of working. Sure it enables one to spew out slop that might make companies money, but there is no passion, sense of exploration, personal growth. Its all just directing parrots with thumbs...

Re: Vibe engineering

#256

Post by piva00 »

senko wrote: post #196
jmspring wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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" a…

That was exactly what UML wanted to do, and it almost never worked out in practice.

Seems to be just a rehashing of the same idea but instead of XML, and diagrams, it's now some free-text to be interpreted by LLMs, so much less deterministic and will probably fail just like UML failed.

People also tend to forget about Peter Naur's take on "Programming as Theory Building" [0], the program is, in itself, the theory of what's implemented. A spec cannot replace that.

[0] https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf

Re: Vibe engineering

#257

Post by iLoveOncall »

__0x01 wrote: post #253

Is cost a risk here? I'm assuming that sometime in the future the price for vibe coding/engineering will go up significantly.

It already is. I saw a demo of someone spending $30 an hour on Cline to do something that would be achieved better, for free, and faster, with a framework.

That's more than $5,000 a month assuming 40 hours a week.

The end result didn't compile by the way.

Re: Vibe engineering

#258

Post by zwnow »

ako wrote: post #225
deanCommie wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think OP thinks his skills are useless per se now, but that the way to apply those skills now feels less fun and enjoyable. Which makes perfect sense - even putting aside the dopamine benefits of getting into a coding flow state. Coding is craftsmanship - in some cases artistry. You're describing Vibe Engineering as management . And sure, a great manager can make more of an impact increasing the productivity…

But does anybody really care about what you like? What about all those other professions that got replaced by technology, did anybody care what they liked? The big question is how is software going to be build most efficiently and most effectively in the future and how do you prepare yourself for this new world. Otherwise you’ll end up with all those other professions that got replaced, like the mineworkers, hoping t…

Its reasonable to stay away from something one considers dystopian considering the industry is not even sure about the usefulness of coding agents in professional environments. When the tractors replaced the horses, everyone could agree they outperform horses. The result was easily measurable. Its not that simple with LLM agents owned by big corporations.

Re: Vibe engineering

#259

Post by mystifyingpoi »

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…

> remind the model to use TDD

I don't know how vibe coding works, but how does this work - is the agent actually engaging in the red-green-refactor loop, or does it just generate the result all at once?

Re: Vibe engineering

#260

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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