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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#441

Post by hansvm »

jrs235 wrote: post #434
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…

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.

Thankfully, yelling like an angry foreman is more effective on LLMs than people.

> Get your fucking act together, and stop with the bullshit comments, shipping unfinished code, and towering mess of abstractions. I've seen you code properly before. You're an expert for God's sake. One more mistake, and you're fired. Fix it, now!

Re: Vibe engineering

#442

Post by kasey_junk »

saulpw wrote: post #222
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 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…

Fwiw I’m an ai proponent who loves that flow state you are describing. Programming literally was the first time I found it as a youth and I’ve been addicted to it since then.

But it’s such a small part of my professional life. Most of what I do is chores and answering simple questions and planning for small iterations on the original thing or setting up a slightly different variant.

Llm’s have freed me of so much of that! Now I outsource most of that work to the llms and greedily keep the deep flow inducing work for myself.

And I have a new tool to explain to management why we are investing in all the tooling and processes that we know lead to quality, because the llms are catnip for the managerial mind.

Re: Vibe engineering

#443

Post by hollerith »

hansvm wrote: post #441
jrs235 wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thankfully, yelling like an angry foreman is more effective on LLMs than people. > Get your fucking act together, and stop with the bullshit comments, shipping unfinished code, and towering mess of abstractions. I've seen you code properly before. You're an expert for God's sake. One more mistake, and you're fired. Fix it, now!

I wouldn't talk that way to an LLM for fear of its bleeding over into my interactions with people.

Back when computer performance was increasing faster than it is now and was more important to the user experience, a friend upgraded to a faster computer and suddenly became more impatient with me. He seemed to have expected my response time to have drastically decreased just like his computer's did.

Re: Vibe engineering

#444

Post by krschacht »

Simon, I think this is a good distinction. Another possible term could be: “agent engineering management” or simply “agent managing.”

I am deep in this and one important way in which managing agents is different than managing people is that micro-managing can be your friend. With human engineering colleagues, you need to allow for a healthy degree of “that’s now how I would have written the code, but it’s a reasonable way to write it.” But if my agent writes the test file in the exact same way I do, I can both review and maintain the code more easily.

I have a bunch of short markdown doc files in which I give very specific instructions for how I like code organized: much stricter than I would ever do for a colleague. I’ll tell the agent, “now add tests to this model and follow @unit_tests.md” This file specifies exactly how I like tests named, what order I like them written in the file, etc. I have docs for: models.md, controllers.md, concerns.md, and fixtures.md.

Re: Vibe engineering

#445

Post by skybrian »

It sounds like some people who are running multiple AI tasks in parallel might be risking burnout because they think they need to keep machines busy. But this is a symptom of systems that don’t run fast enough to be interactive.

If compiles take ten minutes then sure, you’re going to want to do something else while waiting. If they take two seconds, you stop caring about keeping the machine busy because it’s impossible. It’s perfectly normal for computers to be idle waiting on you most of the time.

Re: Vibe engineering

#446

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: Vibe engineering

#447

Post by bryanlarsen »

sgt101 wrote: post #389
bonoboTP wrote: post #350

Earlier 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.

Chose is a little strong. They were forced into it because agricultural societies could field armies orders of magnitude larger than hunter/gatherers.

It's telling that the nobles of agricultural societies generally still hunted, and often reserved that privilege.

Re: Vibe engineering

#448

Post by reginamary32 »

kasey_junk wrote: post #442
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…

Fwiw I’m an ai proponent who loves that flow state you are describing. Programming literally was the first time I found it as a youth and I’ve been addicted to it since then. But it’s such a small part of my professional life. Most of what I do is chores and answering simple questions and planning for small iterations on the original thing or setting up a slightly different variant. Llm’s have freed me of so much of…

[dead]

Re: Vibe engineering

#449

Post by hodgesrm »

justbees wrote: post #410
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'm getting really great results in a VERY old (very large) codebase by having discussion with the LLM (I'm using Claude code) and making detailed roadmaps for new features or converting old features to new more useable/modern code. This means FE and BE changes usually at the same time. I think a lot of the points you make are exactly what I'm trying to do. - start with a detailed roadmap (created by the ai from a pr…

Thank you for this post. I don't write much code as I'm currently mostly managing people but I read it constantly. I also do product management. LLMs are very effective at locating and explaining things in complex code bases. I use Copilot to help me research the current implementation and check assumptions. I'm working to extend out in exactly the directions you describe.

Re: Vibe engineering

#450

Post by krschacht »

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…

You aren’t entertaining the possibility that some experienced engineerings are using these tools to produce incredibly high quality code, while still massively increasing productivity. With good prompting and “vibe engineering” practices, I can assure you: the code I get Claude Code to produce is top notch.
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