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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#271

Post by cindyllm »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #261
plainOldText wrote: post #54

A better term would be “Augmented Engineering” (AE). You want something to inspire engineers to do their best work. When you can expand your capabilities using the power of AI, then yeah, you can do your best work; hence augmented engineering . But vibing? Not so much. I guess AE could also stand for Advanced Engineering , after all the AI gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowled…

I take issue with your last sentence; > gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowledge, on demand, which you can then apply to your work. Gives you access to the power to access and {mis}understand the {most repaeted over the last 1-10 years} engineering {errors, myths, misunderstandings, design flaws}, on demand, which you then can apply to your work {to further bias the dataset for…

[dead]

Re: Vibe engineering

#272

Post by zwnow »

bananapub wrote: post #267
zwnow wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I…

> What about the accessibility of software development? Its completely vanishing for people that can not afford to pay for these agents. what do you actually mean by this? it's clearly untrue - anyone get get a laptop and install linux on it and start bashing out code today, just as they could last week and last year and thirty years ago. do you mean that you think at some point in the future tooling for humans to wr…

I mean that this "tooling" becomes inaccessible to people. At least the tooling that is relevant for jobs. Employers will eventually stop hiring human based on their programming competence. It'll translate into a low pay career for people who like to orchestrate agents.

Re: Vibe engineering

#275

Post by rckt »

This feels like an attempt to sell vibe coding to skeptics. I don't feel there's a need to. People find their own workflows how to use AI. Some people go all in, some use it here and there, some use it to write tests, etc. I feel annoyed enough having the AI topic discussed and reviewed everywhere every day, I don't need more of this.

Re: Vibe engineering

#276

Post by oaxacaoaxaca »

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…

Very well said. I feel the exact same. :(

Re: Vibe engineering

#277

Post by sublimefire »

I find using “Vibe” makes it sound less valuable. It also needs to fit the next frontier which is “refactoring” and tuning the codebase to work with agents to make it easier to change existing code. A suggestion to use “augmented” was great

Re: Vibe engineering

#278

Post by benterix »

lemming wrote: post #205
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…

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.

My lessons so far:

1. Less fun.

2. A lot of more "review fatigue".

3. Tons of excess code I'd never put in there in the first place.

4. Frustration with agents being too optimistic which with time verges on the ludicurous ("Task #3 has been completed successfully with 98% tests failing. [:useless_emojis:]")

5. Frustration with agents routinely getting down a rabbit hole or going in circles, the effort needed to get that straight (Anthropic plainly advises to start from scratch in such cases - which is sound advice, but makes me feel like I just lost the last 5 hours of my life without even learning anything new).

I stopped using agents and use LLMs very sparingly (e.g. for review - they sometimes find some details I missed and occasionally have an interesting solution) but I'm enjoying my work so much more without them.

Re: Vibe engineering

#279

Post by HSO »

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…

Have you tried SolveIt (method, tool) from Jeremy Howard yet?

I was in the first batch last year where they introduced it and going to do the second one too.

It´s a very different kind of beast to what is currently being discussed.

Re: Vibe engineering

#280

Post by ByteDrifter »

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…

This line really hit me. I used to think that mastering one advanced skill would be enough to rely on for life, but it seems that’s no longer the case.
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