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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#341

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #168
apsurd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Absolutely this. LLM assistance means we can work faster, and that we can build things that previously weren't feasible given the available time and resources. Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build ? It doesn't matter how fast you can move if you're consistently solving the wrong problems.

[deleted]

Re: Vibe engineering

#342

Post by jraph »

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…

At least you (or your employer) won't have to pay a shit ton of money for AI subscriptions so you remain productive after the AI bubble bursts.

Re: Vibe engineering

#343

Post by WOTERMEON »

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…

Hey! No J word tolerated in here!

Re: Vibe engineering

#344

Post by rhetocj23 »

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…

One thing I don’t get - If you spend much of your time reviewing, you’re just reading - you’re not actually doing anything - you’re passive in the activity of code production. By extension you will become worse at knowing what a good standard of code is and become worse at reviewing code.

I’m not a SWE so I have no interests to protect by criticising what is going on.

Re: Vibe engineering

#345

Post by zwnow »

wsintra2022 wrote: post #335
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…

I feel your sentiment. However anyone with an interest in computers now has access to an LLM, which to me feels like an upgrade to having access to a modem and a search engine. Knowledge is power right?

Absolutely. If the knowledge is verifiable. Kurzgesagt recently uploaded a video about this, its a lot harder to verify statements due to AI. Not easier. Here is the video in case you are interested: https://youtu.be/_zfN9wnPvU0?si=_17KU8l2wDjGUYA5

Re: Vibe engineering

#346

Post by WOTERMEON »

s_dev wrote: post #322
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 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. Tools always empower those with knowledge further than those without knowledge.

For a while

Re: Vibe engineering

#347

Post by bartread »

afro88 wrote: post #316
senko wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Do you have a sense for how much overhead this is all adding? Or, to put it another way, what I’m really asking is what productivity gain (or loss) are you seeing versus traditional engineering?

Re: Vibe engineering

#348

Post by hollowturtle »

computerex wrote: post #332
hollowturtle wrote: post #294

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 f…

We live in an objective reality. LLM's help a damn lot in speed of development. As someone who has been coding since 5th grade for over 20 years who is known to be a LIGHTNING FAST implementor by many people I have been scaled ridiculously with LLM's. Genie is out of the bag, you have to go with the flow, adapt or else.... I am just as pissed as anybody else at the lack of certainty in the future.... Thought I had my…

Good lord I wish I could have as many certainties as well, one point at a time:

* There is no objective reality, there isn't one in physics, it's just a non argument * "LLM's help a damn lot in speed of development" That may be your experience and my whole point was arguing that speed may not matter * "Genie is out of the bag, you have to go with the flow, adapt or else" I choose else if this the apex of the argument

Re: Vibe engineering

#349

Post by skydhash »

energy123 wrote: post #211
sph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years. But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line commit…

I don't really agree. The writing is on the wall, if not now then in 2 years or 4 years. I arrive at this view not so much based on the capabilities of the tools right now, but based on the property of software being verifiable, which like mathematics, makes it amenable to synthetic data pipelines, with only relatively small remaining details needing to be worked out (such as how to endow architectural taste). This i…

Software is verifiable, but not by other programs. Also software is a soution to a problem, but the problem and the solution properties often don’t exist in the code.

Software and data is a bit soup whre the only thing you truly need is the Turing machine. Programming languages, File format, protocols, and encoding are constructs that are useful because of their general applicability, not because of their intrinsic aspects.

The domain expertise is still, what’s important, and code craftsmanship was the ability to create something that matches it closely enough that the cost of changes was minimal.

Re: Vibe engineering

#350

Post by bonoboTP »

sally_glance wrote: post #262
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…

Well said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ... Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.

The OG alienator was the Agricultural Revolution, settling and toiling repetitively in predetermined ways, unlike the more adventurous lifestyle from before with all the camping, hunting, gathering, where circumstances brought always novel challenges, you could be a man spearing a deer, instead of just killing some docile domesticated cow. Searching for pheasant eggs and being happy if you found some, instead of going out every morning to the predictable presence of eggs in the chicken coop.
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