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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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581–590 of 759 posts

Re: Vibe engineering

#581

Post by pron »

herval wrote: post #565
pron wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Furthermore, techniques of working with agents today may be completely outdated a year from now.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…

> 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. that's a basic skill you gotta have if you're leading anything or anyone. There'll always be levels of that. So if you're planning to lead anyone in your career, it's a good skillset to develop

That's not the same skill at all https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45518204

Re: Vibe engineering

#582

Post by simonw »

hollowturtle wrote: post #576
simonw wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you've never tried training a dog!

Another void argument, we're speaking about tools, dogs are not tools

Yes they are. Guide dogs, hunting dogs, sheep dogs. The comparison to LLMs is genuinely useful here, because dogs are unreliable tools that you have to work with over a period of time to figure out.

I've used this argument for real in the past with people who complain that it's unethical to set sightless people up with vision LLM tools because those tools are unreliable and make mistakes. My counter is that a) so are guide dogs and b) it's rude to discount the agency of people with accessibility needs in evaluating and selecting tools for themselves.

Re: Vibe engineering

#584

Post by roadside_picnic »

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…

Have you ever interacted with any "vibe"-based systems of agents in a production environment? Beyond just cool demos online?

My experience with them is they are fragile monstrosities, that are only permitted to exist at all because leadership is buying into the same hype that is irrationally propping up the companies running the models that make these things possible.

To be clear, my experience hasn't been that I don't like them, it's that they don't really work at all. They're constantly under development (often in the dark) and when a ray of light is cast on them they never successfully do the thing promised.

Cleaning up the messes left behind by these has my skills feeling more valuable then ever before.

Re: Vibe engineering

#585

Post by buildbot »

orbital-decay wrote: post #512
throw219080123 wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Yes. I don't see why these have to be mutually exclusive.

I feel they are mutually inclusive! I don’t think you can meaningfully create new things if you must always be 100% factually correct, because you might not know what correct is for the new thing.

Re: Vibe engineering

#586

Post by unoti »

pron wrote: post #580
unoti wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you’ve be been tasked with leadership of an engineering effort involving multiple engineers and stakeholders you know that this is in fact a crucial part of the role the more senior you get. It is much the same with people: know their limitatio…

Because I reached that position 15 years ago, I can tell you that this is untrue (in the sense that the experience is completely different from an LLM). Training is one thing, but training doesn't increase the productivity of the trainer; it's meant to improve the capability of the trainee. At any level of capability, though - whether we're talking about an intern after one year of university or a senior developer wi…

> effective management requires that you're able to trust that the person tells you when they've hit a snag or anything else you may need to know

This is what we shoot for, yes, but many of the most interesting war stories involve times when people should have been telling you about snags but weren't-- either because they didn't realize they were spinning their wheels, or because they were hoping they'd somehow magically pull off the win before the due date, or innumerable other variations on the theme. People are most definitely not reliable about telling you things they should have told you.

> if you feel you have to review every line of code anyone on the team writes...

Somebody has to review the code, and step back and think about it. Not necessarily the manager, but someone does.

Re: Vibe engineering

#588

Post by thesnide »

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…

to me genAI feels like a neural implanted exoskeleton.

it does awesome in demos. it has a real use.

but

it gets a long training period when one makes mistakes with it, it is big mistakes that take long to fix

Re: Vibe engineering

#589

Post by bob1029 »

subarctic wrote: post #569
bob1029 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're genuinely already good at coding, use the LLM to go horizontal into other complementary verticals that were too expensive to enter prior. Do the same thing that the other professions would do unto yours. As an example, I would have never considered learning to use blender for 3d modeling in a game before having access to an LLM. The ability to quickly iterate through plausible 3d workflows and different des…

Thanks for this, I like your idea about breaking into areas I don't have experience with. E.g. in my case I might make a mobile app which I've never done before, and in theory it should be a lot easier with Claude than it would've been with just googling and reading documentation. Although I did kind of like that process of reading documentation and learning something new but you can't learn everything, you only have…

> Although I did kind of like that process of reading documentation and learning something new but you can't learn everything, you only have so much time on this planet

I actually enjoy reading the documentation more these days, because I am laser focused on what I want to pull out of it after seeing the LLM make a suspicious move.

Re: Vibe engineering

#590

Post by ako »

agentultra wrote: post #511
ako wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it's not yet clear what impact LLMs will have on software development, but the impact it will have will not depend on if developers like to use it or not. If it is going to make software development 10x faster, companies will adopt it, whether devs like it or not.

Sadly true. Most companies don’t even care if the software is sloppy, slow, and ridden with errors that cause data loss or privacy breaches. They care about exploiting workers and extracting value. Is it ethical? Probably not. It took a few bridges falling and buildings caving in before traditional engineering became a profession. In this post-Reagan world I’m not sure software has the right context to make that happ…

Everything is getting industrialized. We buy most products made in China (tv,laptop, mobile phone etc), furniture is mostly cheap IKEA furniture. Many craftsmen lost their profession to industrialized automation. If we don´t care our furniture is subpar, our products are cheap plastic china products, why do we expect anybody to care about software craftsmanship?
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