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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#491

Post by boringg »

melagonster wrote: post #484
twoquestions wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those same people have large equity stakes or are in the surrounding network companies dependent on AI being successful.

Re: Vibe engineering

#492

Post by hansmayer »

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…

Cruise control is a useful technology, that once you learn to use, it's automatic (somethingsomething pun something). LLMs on the other hand - well, yeah - if you like playing chess with pieces and board made out of smoke (to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld), sure you'll probably figure it out...some day...

Re: Vibe engineering

#493

Post by simonw »

blibble wrote: post #462
simonw wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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). it's not a fair comparison the competitions for humans are a display of ingenuity and intelligence because of the limited r…

Google already released the Gemini 2.5 Deep Think model they used in ICPC as part of their $250/month "Ultra" plan.

The trend with all of these models is for the price for the same capabilities to drop rapidly - GPT-3 three years ago was over 1,000x the price of much better models today.

I'm not yet ready to bet against that trend holding for a while longer.

Re: Vibe engineering

#494

Post by schwartzworld »

pron wrote: post #466
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 not sure that having the patience to work with something with a very inconsistent performance and that frequently lies is an extension of existing development skills. It doesn't work like tools developers use and it doesn't work like people developers work with. Furthermore, techniques of working with agents today may be completely outdated a year from now. The acceleration is also inconsistent: sometimes there's…

> incredibly impressive and completely unreliable.

There have been methods of protecting against this since before AI, and they still apply. LLMs work great with test driven development, for example.

I would say that high-level knowledge and good engineering practices more important than ever, but they were always important.

Re: Vibe engineering

#495

Post by iammrpayments »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #45
flakiness wrote: post #9

"Vibe coding" sounds too good. Catchy, ridiculous and still cool. It'd be hard to beat. It's a genius move from Andrej Karpathy.

Except that we're not going to be "coding" very soon. We're going to be firing off jobs that get tracked in VCS, gated through CI, then reviewed by a panel of agents with different specialties. At the end you'll have a few select sections of code that these agents flagged for human review, and thousands of lines of stuff that you don't need to worry about.

You can offer Chatgpt 7 for free, I’ll never use VCS. If it ever get that powerful I’ll instead tell to recreate it without the bloat and battery drainage.

Re: Vibe engineering

#496

Post by blibble »

simonw wrote: post #493
blibble wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). it's not a fair comparison the competitions for humans are a display of ingenuity and intelligence because of the limited r…

Google already released the Gemini 2.5 Deep Think model they used in ICPC as part of their $250/month "Ultra" plan. The trend with all of these models is for the price for the same capabilities to drop rapidly - GPT-3 three years ago was over 1,000x the price of much better models today. I'm not yet ready to bet against that trend holding for a while longer.

> GPT-3 three years ago was over 1,000x the price of much better models today.

right, so only another 27 years of moores law continuing left

> I'm not yet ready to bet against that trend holding for a while longer.

I wouldn't expect an industry evangelist to say otherwise

Re: Vibe engineering

#497

Post by justbees »

hodgesrm wrote: post #449
justbees wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"LLMs are very effective at locating and explaining things in complex code bases." YES. I do nothing BUT write code and tracking everything down in the code base is greatly simplified by using an LLM.

This is just a new tool. I think the farming example mentioned in another post is actually a great example. I love coding. I code in my free time. It's just fun. I've been doing it for ~20 years and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon!

But at work I'm really focused on results more than the fun I can have writing code. If a tractor makes the work easier/faster why would I not use a tractor? Breaking my back plowing isn't really my end goal at work. Having a plowed field is my end goal. If I can ride around in a tractor while doing it great! If I can monitor a fleet of tractors that are plowing multiple fields at once even better!

When I go home I can plant anything I want in any way I want and take all the time I want. Of course that's probably why in my free time I end up working on games I never finish...

Re: Vibe engineering

#498

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #180
bluefirebrand wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had a fascinating conversation about this the other day. An engineer was telling me about his LLM process, which is effectively this: 1. Collaborate on a detailed spec 2. Have it implement that spec 3. Spend a lot of time on review and QA - is the code good? Does the feature work well? 4. Take lessons from that process and write them down for the LLM to use next time - using CLAUDE.md or similar That last step is t…

[deleted]

Re: Vibe engineering

#499

Post by coffeefirst »

zarzavat wrote: post #314
apsurd wrote: post #167

Earlier 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…

> The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too It shouldn't. The agents are not good enough to be used in a fleet. I have Claude. It's fine, but I'm pretty confident that my low usage of Claude would out-compete a fleet of agents, because it feels like there's an inverse correlation between the number of tokens you spend and the quality of the resulting code (more tokens = more code to rev…

That's basically my finding as well. Agent wrangling is herding cats. Working normally but tapping Claude for the smallest possible thing (look this up, finish this psuedocode, grab an example of this) feels like it works better all around—faster, safer, far fewer tokens, results in work that the team understands, aides flow rather than adding constant context switching...

Maybe I'm wrong and the time will come to hang up my editor and go open an Italian restaurant or something. Until then I'm really inclined to believe my own eyes.

Re: Vibe engineering

#500

Post by bluefirebrand »

simonw wrote: post #180
bluefirebrand wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had a fascinating conversation about this the other day. An engineer was telling me about his LLM process, which is effectively this: 1. Collaborate on a detailed spec 2. Have it implement that spec 3. Spend a lot of time on review and QA - is the code good? Does the feature work well? 4. Take lessons from that process and write them down for the LLM to use next time - using CLAUDE.md or similar That last step is t…

> but that means it's on us as their users to manage the improvement cycle by using every feature iteration as as opportunity to improve how they work

This doesn't interest me at all honestly

And every change to the model might invalidate all of this work?

No thank you

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