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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#311

Post by sarmike31 »

Engineering is in large parts about signing-off on something with you name on it, and being responsible if it fails or causes harm. Think bridges, tunnels or other infrastructure. I‘d argue that this is the same for computer engineering. That‘s why I think coining the term ”vibe engineering” can be dangerous.

”Vibe coding” is the better term and actually makes sense for what it describes.

Leave ”engineering” in terms of taking responsibility for what you ”engineer” strictly to human professionals. That’s what people pay for and that is what makes it valuable.

Re: Vibe engineering

#312

Post by beernet »

> I propose we call this vibe engineering

Seriously? The term has been around in the community for as long as "vibe coding" has been around. While both sound equally cringe, the statement leaves a bad taste.

Re: Vibe engineering

#313

Post by vbezhenar »

geeunits wrote: post #291
saulpw wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I enjoy programming and I enjoy being paid for programming. I'm being pressed to use AI for my paid work. And I don't enjoy AI-powered programming.

As of today, I've disabled Copilot. The only autocomplete that I can accept is absolutely mechanical one, not any kind of smart. I want to write the rest of the code myself. I like it.

I was weird in StackOverflow era, because I never blindly applied snippets, like other programmers do. I went over them token by token, reading underlying library sources and docs, always creating my own solution. It made me less productive, but I feel that my code was more robust and maintainable, so it was a good trade-off for me.

May be it'll work out the same way with AI, time will tell.

Re: Vibe engineering

#314

Post by zarzavat »

apsurd wrote: post #167
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 "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies. It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for. But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I di…

> The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too

It shouldn't. The agents are not good enough to be used in a fleet.

I have Claude. It's fine, but I'm pretty confident that my low usage of Claude would out-compete a fleet of agents, because it feels like there's an inverse correlation between the number of tokens you spend and the quality of the resulting code (more tokens = more code to review, more bad code slips through)

Re: Vibe engineering

#316

Post by afro88 »

senko wrote: post #201
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…

> 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 so…

At least on a team, the limit is the team's time to review all the code. We've also found that vibe engineered (or "supervised vibing" as I call it) code tends to have more issues in code review because of a false sense of security creating blind spots when self reviewing. Even more burden on the team.

We're experimenting with code review prompts and sub agents. Seems local reviews are best, so the bulk of the burden is on the vibing engineer, rather than the team.

Re: Vibe engineering

#317

Post by cpursley »

teiferer wrote: post #227
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…

> It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales I'm feeling the same. The moves I'm considering are 1. Landscaping 2. Carpentry 3. Small scale agriculture (All made easier by a cushion of investments that are most of the way to passive income, so the new thing doesn't really have to make me that much money.)

My father runs a commercial landscaping company with 15 employees. His truck fleet insurance went up 35% just this year. His light industrial facility that he operates out of property taxes went up 55% last year. All of his commercial clients are cheaping out on all the little things that used to make extra money (pine straw, seasonal flowers, etc.). He’s having to deal with poorly educated staff who are constantly breaking equipment and doing stupid dangerous things. He’s so burned out by it all, and the fact that his actual salary is less than several of his top staff that he’s thinking about just shutting it all down. When I was working as a software developer, my income was probably twice as much as his without any of the risk or headache.

Re: Vibe engineering

#318

Post by neebz »

All these coding agent workflows really drive home how important a solid test suite is but who’s actually writing the tests? In my case Claude Code keeps missing key scenarios and I’ve had to point out every gap myself.

Also reviewing LLM generated code is way more mentally draining and that’s with just one agent. I can’t imagine trying to review code from multiple agents working in parallel.

Finally I’ve shipped a bunch of features to prod with Claude writing all the code. Productivity definitely went up, but my understanding of the codebase dropped fast. Three months in I’m actually struggling to write good prompts or give accurate estimates because my grasp of the code hasn’t really grown (code reviews only help so much). Curious if anyone else has run into the same thing?

Re: Vibe engineering

#319

Post by 000ooo000 »

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:/…

The guy is all in on the world's biggest copyright infringement machine.. good luck getting your credit

Re: Vibe engineering

#320

Post by danielbln »

csar wrote: post #209
what wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is real work, and it requires solid priors to do it. The cynical people punch three prompts in, are disappointed that it doesn't work in their codebase they've worked in for 2 decades and complain that everyone is a shill and that people should stop saying they "hold it wrong".

The skill ceiling is high, it turns out. It's just deceptive, because it's so easy to get going. Ultra accessible foot gun, lots of work to point it in the right direction reliably and repeatedly. Significant benefits of you manage though.

I've gotten more relaxed about it now though. People will either get it or they don't.

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