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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#291

Post by geeunits »

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…

If it is not about the money, why do you have to use these tools? If you enjoy small farming why concern yourself with mass production, or expensive equipment? Remain in the lane you enjoy?

Re: Vibe engineering

#292

Post by TrackerFF »

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…

Wasn't the original meaning of "vibe coding", as posted by Ilya Sutskever on twitter, that you just feed the model prompts and blindly run whatever results you get. No analysis or review, just copy/paste and hit run.

Re: Vibe engineering

#293

Post by muldvarp »

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 feel like the rug was pulled from under me.

I'm currently looking into other professions, but the future looks bleak for most kinds of knowledge work.

Re: Vibe engineering

#294

Post by hollowturtle »

I don't get the obsession some tech people have to push the idea that this stuff accelerate your coding, increase your productivity. It's all about fast and faster output. In my experience LLMs have mostly produced gibberish oververbose code, surely faster than me, but my lower speed usually produce better code. I don't like this present state of things where we need to chat faster to quickly get out results and go fast in production... that is the kind of mentality that pushed subpar products on the web for so many years. Instead of dropping names lile vibe coding/engineering whatever comes next, let's have a serious discussion why we need faster low quality and we can't just improve automation and processes. Eg I can get unit test generated very fast sure, but my question is: why do we need all these unit tests in the first place? Dont get me wrong they're useful, but I feel like we're advancing higher abstraction instead of advancing lower level tools

Re: Vibe engineering

#295

Post by padolsey »

taylorlunt wrote: post #104

These seem like a lot of great ways to work around the limitations of LLMs. But I'm curious what people here think. Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs? I see how if you can't really code, or you're new to a domain, then it can make a huge difference getting you started, but if you know what you're doing I find you hit a wall pretty quickly trying to…

> Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs?

I know it'll be touted as rhetoric but I have seen an order of magnitude of difference in my ability to ship things. Thankfully I don't work for a large enterprise so I don't have a multi-million line codebase to contend with or anything like that. I also, thankfully, ship projects using languages and libs that are very well represented in LLM corpuses, like TypeScript, NextJS, Postgres, though I have also found a lot of success in less popular things like Neo4j's Cypher.

I also have been massively enabled to do lots more 'ops' stuff. Being a pretty average full-stack eng means I have no experience of running sys/ops monitoring systems but LLMs only recently helped me with a bunch of docker-routing issues I was having, teaching me about Traefik, which I'd never heard of before.

Side-point: I have felt so grateful to these LLMs for freeing up a bunch of my brain space, enabling me to think more laterally and not relying so much on my working memory, severely limited now due to historic brain injury. Often people forget how massively enabling these tools can be for disabled people.

Re: Vibe engineering

#297

Post by igleria »

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…

As time goes by I tend to agree more and more with your POV.

Re: Vibe engineering

#298

Post by resonious »

benterix wrote: post #278
lemming wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I think one of the tricks is to just stop using the agent as soon as you see signs of funny business. If it starts BSing me with failing tests, I just turn it off immediately and git reset (maybe after taking a quick peek)

Re: Vibe engineering

#299

Post by ridruejo »

simonw wrote: post #183
maho wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $enterprise, we were just looking for a proper term that sets "responsible vibing" apart from "YOLO vibe coding". We landed on "agent assisted coding". It's a bit more technical. And it has a three-letter acronym. Gotta have a three letter acronym.

AAC / Agent Assisted Coding is a good term.

A2C?

Re: Vibe engineering

#300

Post by anhner »

pierre_vannier wrote: post #269

Simon, I want to reach out since I want to express my disappointment regarding this thing you write here: "I propose we call this vibe engineering, with my tongue only partially in my cheek." Back in march 2025, you and I had a brief convo on X about this very term that came to my mind "Vibe Engineering": https://x.com/pierre_vannier/status/1904933441042317821 I also mentioned it in our podcast in April 2025: https:/…

we gonna police naming things now?
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