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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#601

Post by jlarocco »

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…

So it's automating away the fun parts, and leaving the humans to rig up automated tests and setup continuous integration...

And unfortunately people who get to architect anything are a small subset of developers.

Re: Vibe engineering

#602

Post by lesuorac »

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

Running a platform where billions of users are able to communicate is pretty technologically marvel.

Lest not forget when Hotz said he could easily fix Twitter's search functionality only to give up after 3 months [1]. When immensen scale is involved things do become difficult.

Like we have a comment below taking a shot at Phillip Morris [2]. Lets see you grow, process, and distribute 1/100 the quality of cigarettes. The end product might not be that great for society but it's not trivial to do it either.

[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/22/23472869/george-hotz-twi...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516831

Re: Vibe engineering

#603

Post by plainOldText »

aDyslecticCrow wrote: post #261
plainOldText wrote: post #54

A better term would be “Augmented Engineering” (AE). You want something to inspire engineers to do their best work. When you can expand your capabilities using the power of AI, then yeah, you can do your best work; hence augmented engineering . But vibing? Not so much. I guess AE could also stand for Advanced Engineering , after all the AI gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowled…

I take issue with your last sentence; > gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowledge, on demand, which you can then apply to your work. Gives you access to the power to access and {mis}understand the {most repaeted over the last 1-10 years} engineering {errors, myths, misunderstandings, design flaws}, on demand, which you then can apply to your work {to further bias the dataset for…

You're absolutely right ((:

Now, seriously though, no tools is perfect, and I agree we should not trust it blindly, but leaving aside AI Agents, LLMs are very helpful in illuminating one's path, by consulting a large body of knowledge on demand, particularly when dealing with problems which might be new to you, but which have already been tackled one way or another by other people in the industry (provided they're in the training set of course).

Yes, there's always the risk of perpetuating existing slop. But that is the risk in any human endeavor. The majority of people mostly follow practices and knowledge established by the few. How many invent new things?

To be honest, I haven't yet used AI agents, I'm mostly just using LLMs as a dialogue partner to further my own understanding and to deepen my knowledge. I think we're all still trying to figure it out how to best use it.

Re: Vibe engineering

#604

Post by weaksauce »

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…

it's taken programming from being fully waiting on compilations to being incrementally compiled and productive back to waiting on the compiler all over again.

Re: Vibe engineering

#605

Post by azemetre »

nc wrote: post #531
hollowturtle wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Being part of a oligopoly has its perks.

Re: Vibe engineering

#606

Post by azemetre »

simonw wrote: post #582
hollowturtle wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Comparing dogs, things that experience sentience, to software feels deeply dystopian and antihuman.

Re: Vibe engineering

#607

Post by mekoka »

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…

People are constantly looking for definite tendencies and magic patterns so they can abdicate situational awareness and critical thinking. We observe that fast delivery has often correlated with success in software and we infer that fast delivery is a factor of success. Then it becomes about the mindless pursuit of the measure, speed of delivery, as Goodhart's law predicts.

Let's even concede that speed of delivery indeed is an actual factor, there has to be a threshold. There's a point where people just don't care how fast you're putting out features, because your product has found its sweet spot and is perfectly scratching its market's itch. A few will clearly notice when the line of diminishing returns is crossed and if they can reset their outlook to fit the new context, a continuous focus on speed of delivery will look increasingly obsessive and nonsensical.

But that's the reality of the majority of the software development world. Few of us work on anything mission critical. We could produce nice sane software at a reasonable pace with decent output, but we're sold the idea that there's always more productivity to squeeze and we're told that we really really want that juice.

Re: Vibe engineering

#608

Post by [deleted] »

azemetre wrote: post #606
simonw wrote: post #582

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Comparing dogs, things that experience sentience, to software feels deeply dystopian and antihuman.

[deleted]

Re: Vibe engineering

#609

Post by bartread »

rhetocj23 wrote: post #523
bartread wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem is the perennial, how much of what we do actually has value? Churning out 5x (or whatever - I’m deliberately being a bit hyperbolic) as much code sounds great on the face of it but what does it matter if little to none of it is actually valuable? You correctly identify that software development is often driven by fashion and emotion but the much much bigger problem is that product and portfolio mana…

"I suppose the big advantage of being more “productive” is that you can churn through more wrong ideas more quickly and thus perhaps improve your chances of stumbling across something that is valuable." But I think there is a very big danger here - you build in the action but completely neglect the deep thinking behind a vision, strategy etc. So yes you produce more stuff. But that stuff means more money spent - whic…

Yeah, I mean, you might be right. As others have commented, I think it's simply very hard to say what gains we're really going to see from AI-assisted software development at present.

And then of course there's the question of how many businesses have their key value proposition rendered obsolete, and to what extent it's rendered obsolete, by AI: doesn't have to be completely nullified for them to fail (which obviously applies to some software companies, but goes far beyond that sector).

Re: Vibe engineering

#610

Post by tcdent »

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…

> they're not going to be able to rig up a set of automated tests with continuous integration and continuous deployment to a Kubernetes cluster somewhere.

Honestly, I have a ton of experience in system administration, and I'm super comfortable at a command line and using AWS tooling.

But, my new approach is to delegate almost all of that to Claude, which can access AWS via the command-line interface and generate configuration files for me and validate that they work correctly. It has dramatically reduced the amount of time that I spend fiddling with and understanding the syntax of infra config files.

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