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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#361

Post by bonoboTP »

This name makes no sense. "Vibe" means you're just vibing, just taking in vague impressions, just YOLOing, hoping it works out and just chilling and providing little input and effort. It's part pejorative and part ironic self-deprecation. "Vibe X" now means doing X by just giving vague instructions to the computer, not checking the output much and hoping it works out and it kinda does in part, at least enough times that it feels like it's a fine way to do stuff you just want to get over with anyway.

Vibe engineering would mean giving access to Google Computer Use API to your engineering design software and letting it design the industrial component you're working on, without even looking at what it does and just telling it to "fix it" if it seems bump into problems.

Re: Vibe engineering

#362

Post by sgt101 »

codr7 wrote: post #327
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 still haven't seen any evidence to match these repeated claims of increased efficiency. What I have seen is reports that makes a lot of sense to me claiming it's all in the user's head.

Maybe it's in my head, but I have completed coding projects that I believe would have taken a team of five offshore maybe 12 weeks to do in the past in about ten working days while juggling calls and living normal corporate life.

The win is that I don't have to share the vision of what needs to be done and how it should all work, and then constantly monitor and reframe that in the face of the teams missteps and real findings. I work with the agents directly, and provided I set the architecture and build up systematically I can get really good results. The cycle time between me identifying an issue and the issue getting fixed by me and the agents is now minutes rather than hours or days with an off shore team. Even better the agents can provide bug fixing expertise much quicker than stack overflow - so I can figure out what's wrong much faster so as to specific what needs fixing.

It is no good walking in and requesting functionality, you need to know how the thing you want should work, and you need to know what good looks like, and what bad looks like, and how good is separated from bad. Then the normal process of discovery ("eep that doesn't actually work like I thought") can take place and you can refactor and repair as required.

Sometimes I start something that just doesn't work, you have to recognise that you and the agents are lost, and everything needs to be torn down. You then need to think properly about whats gone wrong and why, and then come back with a better idea. Again - just like with dev teams, but much more clearly and much faster.

Re: Vibe engineering

#363

Post by frumiousirc »

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.

> AAC / Agent Assisted Coding is a good term.

Yes, please don't push "vibe engineering" to mean how you defined it in your blog post. To me, it means exactly the opposite.

I see "vibe" as pejorative. Adding "engineering" does not elevate it from "vibe coding", as I think is your intention in the post, it just shifts "vibe" term to a different domain.

To me, "vibe engineering" means using LLM to develop "design" with no care as to its validity just like "vibe coding" means for "code".

"Agentic xyz" or "Agent assisted xyz" is more fitting.

FWIW, I do not see "vibe" as always pejorative, rather it depends on goals. When quick results and not long term quality matter, "vibing" is a legit tactic.

Anyways, just my interpretations. Please, keep up the good work. Remember, the two hardest things in software are naming, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. It's good you continue to tackle the zeroth one.

Re: Vibe engineering

#364

Post by Cthulhu_ »

selcuka wrote: post #153
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…

Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.

Junior developers or maybe even better, outsourced developers - there's a big segment of software engineering that involves writing requirements and checking the work of an external software development company, with many companies heavily dependent on it (as they outsourced part of their core business, e.g. mainframes, SAP, whatever).

Re: Vibe engineering

#365

Post by llamatastic »

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…

I really don't get the idea that LLMs somehow create value. They are burning value. We only get useful work out of them because they consume past work. They are wasteful and only useful in a very contrived context. They don't turn electricity and prompts into work, they turn electricity, prompts AND past work into lesser work.

How can anyone intellectually honest not see that? Same as burning fossil fuels is great and all except we're just burning past biomass and skewing the atmosphere contents dangerously in the process.

Re: Vibe engineering

#366

Post by Cthulhu_ »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #171
selcuka wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.

Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? The reason we invest this time in Junior devs is so they improve. LLMs do not

> LLMs do not

Maybe not in the session you interact with, however we are in a 'learning' phase now where I'm confident enough usage of AI coding agents is tracked and analyzed by its developers; this feedback cycle can in theory produce newer and better generations of AI coding agents.

Re: Vibe engineering

#367

Post by prerok »

ruszki wrote: post #228
prerok wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not call these managerial skills: these are skills of lead engineers. Management does not really look at the code, right?

Not just the “management” needs managerial skills.

You would have to have these skills as you become senior engineer anyway. I have never heard these tasks to be referred to as managing people.

Re: Vibe engineering

#368

Post by executesorder66 »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #344
benterix wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Tell that to Linus Torvalds.

His whole job is just doing code review, and I'd argue he's better at coding now than he ever was before.

Re: Vibe engineering

#369

Post by rhetocj23 »

bartread wrote: post #347
afro88 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Very curious to hear responses about this too

Re: Vibe engineering

#370

Post by rhetocj23 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #357
codr7 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't seen any evidence to match these repeated claims of increased efficiency. What I have seen is reports that makes a lot of sense to me claiming it's all in the user's head.

I'm working in corporate and haven't seen it yet. The main thing I see is blogs and whatnot of people building new weekend projects with LLMs, that is, greenfield, non-critical software - the type of software that, if I were to write it, I wouldn't bother with CI, tests, that kind of thing with. Sloppy projects, if you will. But happy to be corrected - is someone using these agents in their paid / professional / ente…

I’ve asked this many times on here - I never get a coherent answer
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