Vibe engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: Vibe engineering

#481

Post by hollowturtle » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

joenot443 wrote: post #458

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…

> that is the kind of mentality that pushed subpar products on the web for so many years Famously, some of those subpar products are now household names who were able to stake out their place in the market because of their ability to move quickly and iterate. Had they prioritized long-maintainable code quality rather than user journey, it's possible they wouldn't be where they are today. "Move fast and break things"…

Facebook didn't solved any real problem, "Move fast and break things" is for investors not hackers.

Famously gmail was very good quality web app and code(can't say the same today) surely not the product of today's "fast iteration" culture

Re: Vibe engineering

#482

Post by twoquestions » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:23 PM UTC

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…

People keep comparing LLMs to automated looms, but I find them more comparable to cruise control than autopilot.

I've been working on a character sheet application for a while, and decided to vibe-code it with Spec-kit to help me write up a specification, and for things I know it's been great. I tried using Claude to make it into a PWA (something I don't know very well) as an experiment, and I've found the nanosecond the model strays out of my experience and knowledge everything goes straight to Hell. It wraps my codebase around a tree as if I'm not paying attention while driving.

It's a tool you'll have to learn to use, but I can say with absolute confidence it's no replacement for actual skills, if anything it highlights the gulf between people who know what they're doing and people who don't, for better and worse. It sacrifices some of the 'code under your fingers' feeling for management tasks, which I personally really like, as I've always wanted to document/test/code review/spec things out better, and I now understand the pain of people who'd rather not do that sort of thing.

https://github.com/github/spec-kit

Re: Vibe engineering

#483

Post by voidhorse » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:27 PM UTC

I get the impetus behind the term and I think it's a good article with a lot of practical advice overall, however I am disheartened by the terminology on two fronts:

1. It is confusing in the sense that all other engineering disciplines have the form " engineering" where X is the object being engineered. This makes it sound like we are engineering vibes, not software. 2. Software engineering was already only marginally worthy of the term "engineering". There is a strong subset of computational system building that I think actually meets the standard of engineering (rigorously understanding requirements and system bounds, probably showing that the system achieves stability within those bounds). This just makes that situation worse. The devil is in the details, and over-reliance on llms ultimately makes those details a black box to the designer. Before you claim it's the same as when a designer relies on a suite of humans—no. The designer can ask those humans for reverentially transparent proofs that certain conditions are upheld, there is a social accountability structure, etc etc all of which does not exist with LLMs even if they get good enough that we can just trust them.

If we are going to keep calling software construction engineering, can we please at least get industry wide standards around ethics before we go off vibing? There's so much that we still sorely need in order to really make this discipline rigorous and socially accountable in the first place.

Re: Vibe engineering

#484

Post by melagonster » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:28 PM UTC

twoquestions wrote: post #482

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…

People keep comparing LLMs to automated looms, but I find them more comparable to cruise control than autopilot. I've been working on a character sheet application for a while, and decided to vibe-code it with Spec-kit to help me write up a specification, and for things I know it's been great. I tried using Claude to make it into a PWA (something I don't know very well) as an experiment, and I've found the nanosecond…

I do not know... I keep seeing everywhere, people promising that agent-based tools can solve all these problems and handle full, project-level tasks.

Re: Vibe engineering

#485

Post by lukevp » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:29 PM UTC

mnky9800n wrote: post #413

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.

I also think that managing a coding agent isnt like managing a person. a person is creative, they will come up with ways that challenge whatever idea you have and that usually makes the project better. A coding agent never challenges you, mostly just does whatever you want, and you don't end up having any kind of intellectual person to person engagement that is why working on teams can be fun. So it kind of isolates…

Have you used SOTA models to code in the last 2 months or so? This reads like someone who has given up a year ago and made their impressions based off GPT-3.

AI can absolutely have creativity. You just have to engage it like that. The article itself talks about that. You don’t just say “hey AI, go write this code.” You write a spec along with the AI. You tell it what parts are open to its interpretation. Tell it if you want it to be creative or to follow common practices. What level of abstraction is appropriate, etc.

If all you do is give it directions then it just follows the directions.

Also context doesn’t have much to do with a data schema. It’s more like a document database with no schema, if anything. It’s a collection of tokens that it refers back to. Schema implies some structured data with semantic meaning and hierarchies or relationships. That might exist as an emergent property, but for example if I just had a folder full of PDFs, I wouldn’t consider that a schema. That’s kinda what context is like.

Re: Vibe engineering

#486

Post by agentultra » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:31 PM UTC

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.

Many Luddites were fine with using the new Loom machines. They smashed them because they were precious to the capital holders and in a time when there were no labour laws. The Luddites were protesting child labour, forced labour, and having no social safety net when they were discarded by their employers other than workhouses.

Re: Vibe engineering

#487

Post by hansmayer » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:32 PM UTC

Just reading that exhaustive list of what you supposedly need to do to "be successful" with the non-deterministic-random-text-generation tool shows clearly this is a solution in search of a problem. As engineers we need to principally reject what the disconnected billionaire class are currently pushing on us with these non-tools and this is not, I want to stress that, not because we fear "replacement" - I don't think these machines can replace even the Joe Bullshit in powerpoint generation, as evident from the recent case with Deloitte in Australia. The reason is more profound - these tools endanger the quality of not just engineering, but also outputs in other fields and as such are plain dangerous to the society. If this is supposed to be the future of engineering, then doors falling of Boeings will be but funny anecdotes of "better times" I am afraid. No, this cannot be the future of engineering and in general professional work, unless we want to become again disenfranchised and ignorant serfs.

Re: Vibe engineering

#488

Post by pron » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:33 PM UTC

twoquestions wrote: post #482

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…

People keep comparing LLMs to automated looms, but I find them more comparable to cruise control than autopilot. I've been working on a character sheet application for a while, and decided to vibe-code it with Spec-kit to help me write up a specification, and for things I know it's been great. I tried using Claude to make it into a PWA (something I don't know very well) as an experiment, and I've found the nanosecond…

The difference is that you can trust cruise control to do whatever limited job it knows how to do; you can't trust an LLM to do anything. That makes it, I think, hard to compare to anything we're used to (happily) working with.

Re: Vibe engineering

#489

Post by senko » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:34 PM UTC

jleechan2015 wrote: post #436

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…

What gives you the fatigue?

Switching between the two parallel agents (frontend & backend, same project), requiring context switches.

I'm speccing out the task in detail for one agent, then reviewing code for the previous task on the other agent and testing the implementation, then speccing the next part for that one (or asking for fixes/tweaks), then back to the first agent.

They're way faster in producing code than I am in reviewing and spelling out in details what I want, meaning I always have the other one ready.

When doing everyting myself, there are periods where I need to think hard and periods where it's pretty straightforward and easy (typing out the stuff I envisioned, boilerplate, etc).

With two agents, I constantly need to be on full alert and totally focused (but switching contexts every few minutes), which is way more tiring for me.

With just one agent, the pauses in the workflow (while I'm waiting for it to finish) are long enough to get distracted but short enough to not being able to do anything else (mostly).

Still figuring out the sweet spot for me personally.

Re: Vibe engineering

#490

Post by voidhorse » Wed, Oct 08, 2025, 1:35 PM UTC

hansmayer wrote: post #487

Just reading that exhaustive list of what you supposedly need to do to "be successful" with the non-deterministic-random-text-generation tool shows clearly this is a solution in search of a problem. As engineers we need to principally reject what the disconnected billionaire class are currently pushing on us with these non-tools and this is not, I want to stress that, not because we fear "replacement" - I don't think…

Amen brother. Other engineers directly recognize the duty they owe to society beyond the duty they owe to any particular company, they have certifications boards and ethical standards for precisely this reason.

It's high time software engineers do the same if they really want to be engineers and not just corporate lackeys who happen to know how to program and/or design computational systems.