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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#591

Post by herval »

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

Nope, effective management is on YOU, not them. If everyone you’re managing is completely transparent and immediately tells you stuff, you’re playing in easy mode

Re: Vibe engineering

#592

Post by saltyoldman »

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…

This is what I've seen as well - in the past a large refactor for a codebase like that seemed nearly impossible. Now doing something like "add type hints" in python or "convert from js to ts" is possible in a few days instead of months to never.

Another HUGE one is terraforming our entire stack. It's gone from nearly impossible to achievable with AI.

Re: Vibe engineering

#593

Post by unoti »

herval wrote: post #591
pron wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Nope, effective management is on YOU, not them. If everyone you’re managing is completely transparent and immediately tells you stuff, you’re playing in easy mode

> If everyone you’re managing is completely transparent and immediately tells you stuff, you’re playing in easy mode

So much this. There are many managers who are effective at managing people who do not need management.

Re: Vibe engineering

#594

Post by steveklabnik »

throw219080123 wrote: post #432
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…

> 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.

As a human, I sometimes write code that does not compile first try. This does not mean that I am stupid, only that I can make mistakes. And the development process has guardrails against me making mistakes, namely, running the compiler.

Re: Vibe engineering

#595

Post by agentultra »

ako wrote: post #590
agentultra wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because the cost of faults is much higher than getting a new bookshelf from IKEA.

When talking about craftsmanship I’m not talking about artisanal, hand crafted source code that is aesthetically pleasing. Nobody but programmers care.

I’m talking about CVEs that allow RCE on your phone so that authoritarian governments can exfiltrate your contact lists and arrest all of the people they suspect of participating in protests that you were involved in.

When companies don’t care about quality and they’re not forced to we end up with slow, surveillance bloatware that is full of security holes and useless features designed to keep us engaged and paying.

Re: Vibe engineering

#596

Post by steveklabnik »

simonw wrote: post #538
hitarpetar wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

I know this is something you care about, and I'm not your parent, but something I've often observed in conversations about technology on here, but especially around AI, is that if you say good things about something, you are an "evangelist." It's really that straightforward, and doesn't change even if you also say negative things sometimes.

Re: Vibe engineering

#597

Post by discreteevent »

unoti wrote: post #586
pron wrote: post #580

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 magic…

> the most interesting war stories involve times when people should have been telling you about snags but weren't-

This comes up a lot. A person sometimes does an undesirable thing that an AI also does. So you might as well use the AI.

But we don't apply this thinking to people. If a person does something undesirable sometimes then we accept that because they are human. If they do it very frequently then at some point, given a choice, you will stop working with that person.

Re: Vibe engineering

#598

Post by simonw »

steveklabnik wrote: post #596
simonw wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

I know this is something you care about, and I'm not your parent, but something I've often observed in conversations about technology on here, but especially around AI, is that if you say good things about something, you are an "evangelist." It's really that straightforward, and doesn't change even if you also say negative things sometimes.

In that case yeah, I'm an LLM "evangelist" (not so much other forms of generative AI - I play with image/video generation occasionally but I don't spend time telling people that they're genuinely worthwhile tools to learn). I'm also a Python evangelist, a SQLite evangelist, a vanilla JavaScript evangelist, etc etc etc.

Re: Vibe engineering

#599

Post by sgt101 »

bregma wrote: post #429
sgt101 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although, gradually, all over the world people chose that lifestyle rather than take their chances with the seasons and the hunt.

Mostly because if you settled down a tilled a field of barley you had a reliable source of beer. Finding beer in the wild was and still is an almost certain failure. The roots of global civilization are brown and frothy.

So what you're telling me is that I am genetically predisposed to brew and drink beer?

Explains a lot.

Explains it to my satisfaction!

Re: Vibe engineering

#600

Post by jcmontx »

My thoughts:

* There are actual productivity gains to Agentic Coding (my tool of preference is Claude Code)

* There is a big chance of producing a lot of slop if one does not use it with care

* More than ever checking mechanisms are essential (static type checking and a good unit testing suite)

* Everything that was boring and tiresome about unit testing is now mandatory since you will be writing almost none of it.

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