Your second point “planning in advance” could be referred to as spec-driven development… it’s a funny term in a sense (didn’t we always do that?), but I think your 7th point drives it home “a very weird form of management” - clear instructions, necessary context, and actionable feedback.
As far as written words go, much more like waterfall than agile.
Vibe engineering
431–440 of 759 posts
Re: Vibe engineering
#432Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ext…
> consider the fact that both Gemini and OpenAI got gold medal level performance
Yet ChatGPT 5 imagines API functions that are not there and cannot figure out basic solutions even when pointed to the original source code of libraries on GitHub.
Re: Vibe engineering
#433I 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 can't even begin to imagine how a 12-year old who discovered how empowering bending the machine to do your will through code feels when, over time, realize that their dream career has been reduced to being an LLM middleman.
Now imagine a recent graduate, deep into debt, seeing all opportunities to pay off that debt vanishing before their eyes.
Re: Vibe engineering
#434Earlier 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…
Regarding #3. I feel it's related to this idea: We can build a wood frame house with 2x4's or toothpicks. AI directed and generated code today tends to build things overly complex with more pieces than necessary. I feel like an angry foreman yelling at AI to fix this, change that, etc. I feel I spend more time and energy supervising AI while getting a sloppier end result.
Re: Vibe engineering
#435Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
The problem with this is that software engineering is a very unorganized and fashion/emotion driven domain.
We don't have reliable productivity numbers for basically... anything.
I that I'm more productive with statically typed languages but I haven't seen large scale, reliable studies. Same with unit tests, integration tests, etc.
And then there are all the types of software engineering: web frontend, web API, mobile frontend, command line frontend, Windows GUI, MacOS GUI, Linux backend (10 million different stacks), Windows backend (1 million different stacks), throwaway projects, WordPress webpages, etc, etc.
Re: Vibe engineering
#436Earlier 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…
What gives you the fatigue?
Re: Vibe engineering
#437I did a several-month experiment using Claude as the only engineer on a real SaaS side project (Node.js/React, prod-quality, full feature ownership). My observations: The quality of Claude’s output strongly correlates with how explicit and detailed the specs are. Markdown checklists, acceptance criteria, and clear task structure led to far fewer corrections and surprises. Most mistakes were never “creative hallucinat…
> I spent a lot more time up front thinking through specs.
Presumably you didn’t work like this before but now you are? Have you tried simply doing this when manually coding? It’s possible you’re getting a speed up from embracing good practices.
Re: Vibe engineering
#438I 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…
My rule of thumb, and its likely not the industry standard is, if I cannot maintain the code should all AI disappear, I don't use the code. I am able to tackle impostor syndrome that sometimes hits when I touch things that are new or unknown to me, and ask an LLM to give me sources and reasons and even explain it like I'm a five year old.
The LLM will not save you when everything is on fire and you need to fix things. The context window is simply not big enough. It could be your last change, it could also be a change six months ago that is lost in the weeds.
Re: Vibe engineering
#439hi Simon - just a note to say that your link to https://tools.simonwillison.net/ goes to https://simonwillison.net/
Think this might be a typo
Re: Vibe engineering
#440If they know what they're doing, we trust the experts to select their tools rather than letting those tools define the person.
Script Kiddie != Hacker
Wrench Jockey != Mechanic
Vibe Coder != Engineer