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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#531

Post by nc »

hollowturtle wrote: post #525
nc wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has a 1.79T market cap, they definitely solved some very real problems to get there. There are lots of companies doing well producing high quality products out of the gate today though, look at Linear. Both approaches are valid for building sustainable enduring businesses.

> Meta has a 1.79T market cap, they definitely solved some very real problems to get there. Sure exploiting human attention to sell them ads, it's not technological marvel, I'd say psychological

Pretty negative take, TV and Radio also exploit human attention in your book?

Technology wise they created React, PyTorch, GraphQL and Llama is open weights.

Re: Vibe engineering

#532

Post by fhd2 »

tuveson wrote: post #530
nc wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has a 1.79T market cap, they definitely solved some very real problems to get there. There are lots of companies doing well producing high quality products out of the gate today though, look at Linear. Both approaches are valid for building sustainable enduring businesses.

Phillip Morris has a 238B market cap. What problems are they solving?

Withdrawal symptoms :P The buyer decides whether their problem is a good one to have and whether the solution is adequate. Even when it's, objectively, not.

Re: Vibe engineering

#533

Post by hitarpetar »

simonw wrote: post #506
blibble wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I'm a pretty bad "industry evangelist" considering I won't shut up about how prompt injection hasn't had any meaningful improvements in the last three years and I doubt that a robust solution is coming any time soon. I expect this industry might prefer an "evangelist" who hasn't written 126 posts about that: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ (And another 221 posts about ethical concerns with how this s…

you would be a lot more credible if you were honest about being an evangelist

Re: Vibe engineering

#534

Post by dcreater »

Please no. We already have a bunch of (human society) semantic slop from vibe coding term being misused. The last thing we need right now is another poorly developed term

Re: Vibe engineering

#535

Post by krychu »

It’s great to read in the comments about experiences of others with vibe coding. But I also feel like lots of opinions are not coming from actual experience, or “serious” attempts at vibe coding, and more from theoretical deliberations. I might be wrong.

Here are some of my own high-level experiences / thoughts:

- Perhaps contrary to popular belief I think vibe coding will bring the best software / system architects. This is due to massively shortened feedback loop between architectural idea and seeing it in action, easiness with which it can be changed, and the ability to discuss it at any moment.

- We’re not really coding anymore. This is a new role, not a role of a senior dev reviewing PRs of junior devs. Devs are just best suited (currently) to take on this new role. I came to realization that if you’re reviewing all generated code in detail you’re doing it wrong. You just shifted bottleneck by one step. You’re still coding. You should skim if the code is in line with your high-level expectation and then make LLM maintain an architecture doc and other docs that describe what and how you’re building (this is the info you should know in detail). You can do audits with another LLM whether the implementation is 100% reflecting the docs, you can chat with LLM about implementation at any moment if you ever need. But you should not know the implementation the way you know it today. The implementation became the implementation detail. The whole challenge is to let go of the old and embrace and search for efficiency in the new setup.

- Connected to the above: reading through LLM outputs is a massive fatigue. You are exhausted after the day, because you read hundreds of pages. This is a challenge to fight. You cannot unlock full potential here if you aim at reading and reviewing everything.

- Vibe coding makes you work on the problem level much more. I never liked the phrase “ideas are cheap”. And now finally I think the tides will turn, ideas are and will be king.

- Devil is in the detail, 100%. People with ability to see connections, distill key insights, communicate and articulate clearly, think clearly, are the ones to benefit.

Hope this is helpful for others.

Re: Vibe engineering

#536

Post by sarchertech »

simonw wrote: post #460
hollowturtle wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm experienced, I don't accept the implication that I might not be able to use these tools are their full potential and you won't convince me only because you mention an anecdotical example

You must be very confident in your own ability if you think you can use any tool to its full potential with no scope for getting better. I have tools I've been using for 25 years that I still think I could be using better.

You also must be very confident in your own ability if you don’t think that at least some of the things you’re doing that you’d classify as “skill at using the tool” aren’t just superstitions à la Skinner’s pigeons.

Re: Vibe engineering

#537

Post by simonw »

sarchertech wrote: post #536
simonw wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must be very confident in your own ability if you think you can use any tool to its full potential with no scope for getting better. I have tools I've been using for 25 years that I still think I could be using better.

You also must be very confident in your own ability if you don’t think that at least some of the things you’re doing that you’d classify as “skill at using the tool” aren’t just superstitions à la Skinner’s pigeons.

I'm sure a lot of them are superstitions! I've written about that before: https://simonwillison.net/2023/Aug/27/wordcamp-llms/#superst...

One of the more "engineering" like skills in using this stuff is methodically figuring out what's a superstition and what actually works.

Re: Vibe engineering

#538

Post by simonw »

hitarpetar wrote: post #533
simonw wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a pretty bad "industry evangelist" considering I won't shut up about how prompt injection hasn't had any meaningful improvements in the last three years and I doubt that a robust solution is coming any time soon. I expect this industry might prefer an "evangelist" who hasn't written 126 posts about that: https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/ (And another 221 posts about ethical concerns with how this s…

you would be a lot more credible if you were honest about being an evangelist

Credibility is genuinely one of the things I care most about. What can I do to be more honest here?

(Also what do you mean here by an "evangelist"? Do you mean someone who is an unpaid fan of some of the products, or are you implying a financial relationship?)

Re: Vibe engineering

#539

Post by j45 »

simonw wrote: post #165
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…

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…

Software developers can 10x-100x productivity/effectiveness with LLMs.

Non developers can go from 0x to 1x. And I'm happy for people finally being able to learn about building software one way.

And then learn why vibe coding often creates more quickly disposable code.

Re: Vibe engineering

#540

Post by floatrock »

senko wrote: post #489
jleechan2015 wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 spell…

I've been meaning to try out some text-to-speech to see if that makes it a bit easier. Part of the difficulty of "spelling out in detail what I want" is the need for precise written language, which is high cognitive load, which makes the context switching difficult.

Been wondering if just natural speaking could both speed up typing. Maybe have an embedded transform/compaction that strips out all the ummms and gets to the point of what you were trying to say. Might have lower cognitive load, which could make it easier.

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