Welcome to me 13 years ago when India happened. Nobody cared back then. So I just left.
Vibe engineering
391–400 of 759 posts
Re: Vibe engineering
#392Earlier 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 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 an…
> How can anyone intellectually honest not see that?
The idea that they can only solve problems that they've seen before in their training data is one of these things that seems obviously true, but doesn't hold up once you consistently use them to solve new problems over time.
If you won't accept my anecdotal stories about this, consider the fact that both Gemini and OpenAI got gold medal level performance in two extremely well regarded academic competitions this year: the International Math Olympiad (IMO) and the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC).
This is notable because both of those contests have brand new challenges created for them that have never been published before. They cannot be in the training data already!
Re: Vibe engineering
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 goin…
Although, gradually, all over the world people chose that lifestyle rather than take their chances with the seasons and the hunt.
Exactly, and similarly people may adopt AI too, whether they like the aesthetics or not.
Re: Vibe engineering
#394Can anyone suggest solution(s) to create temporary preview environments per branch or Pull Request?
For example if someone creates a Pull Request "#2122 feat: User password change"
Automation would deploy it to pr_2122_feat_user_password_change.mycompany.com
Re: Vibe engineering
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 goin…
Comparing the impact of LLMs on programming to the agricultural revolution is a pretty solid analogy!
Re: Vibe engineering
#396Earlier 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.
> Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build?
You should build what’s personally fun and challenging to you and/or what is useful and solves a problem. Building for any other reason, including and especially the unfettered pursuit of profit, is what turns everything to shit.
Re: Vibe engineering
#397I 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…
Of course the devil is in the details. What you say and the skills needed make sense. It's unfortunately also the easiest aspects to dismiss either under pressure as there is often little immediate payoff, or because it's simply the hard part.
My experience with llms in general is that sadly, they're mostly good bullshitters. (current google search is the epitome of worthlessness, the AI summary so hard tries to make things balanced, that it just dreams up and exaggerates pros en cons for most queries). In a same way platforms like perplexity are worthless, they seem utterly unable to assign the proper value to sources they gather.
Of course that doesn't stop me from using llms where they're useful; it's nice to be able to give the architecture for a solution and let the llm fill the gaps than to code the entire thing by hand. And code-completion in general is a beautiful thing (sadly not a thing where much focus is on these days, most is on getting the llm create complete solutions while i would be delighted by even better code completion)
Still all in all, the more i see llms used (or the more i see (what i assume) well willing people copy/paste llm generated responses in favor of handwritten responses) on so much of the internet, resulting in a huge decline of factualness and reproducibility (in he sense, that original sources get obscured), but an increase of nice full sntences and proper grammar, the more i'm inclined to belief that in the foreseeable future llm's aren't a net positive.
(in a way it's also a perfect storm, the last decade education unprioritised teaching skills that would matter especially for dealing with AI and started to educate for use of tools instead of educate general principles. The product of education became labourers for a specific job instead of higher abstract level reasoning in a general area of expertise)
Re: Vibe engineering
#398I 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 just wish AI made compilers smarter in a provably correct way instead of a lame attempt at making programmers smarter. I want tools that are smarter, but still 100% correct at what they do. Any tools/languages that address this gap?
Something I really appreciate about LLMs is that they make a whole bunch of much more sophisticated reliable tooling acceptable to me.
I've always been fascinated by AST traversal and advanced refactoring tools - things like tree-sitter or Facebooks's old codemod system https://github.com/facebookarchive/codemod
I never used them, because the learning curve in them was steep enough that I never found the time to climb it to the point that I could start solving problems.
Modern LLMs know all of these tools, which flattens that curve for me - I find it much easier to learn something like that if I can start from semi-working examples directly applicable to what I'm trying to do.
Re: Vibe engineering
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 b…
No one is claiming that any of the alternatives are better jobs than software engineering has been for the last 20 years.
We don't live in the last 20 years anymore and software engineering is either becoming a different (worse) job or simply vanishing.
Re: Vibe engineering
#400"Vibe Technical Debt Creation" <-- either that or the AI's purpose is limited to sTimulation (getting us to think while it's spinning its wheels writing throwaway code.