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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#631

Post by jplusequalt »

vineyardmike wrote: post #577
Bjorkbat wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people underestimate the degree to which fun matters when it comes to productivity. If something isn’t fun then I’ll likely put it off. A 15 minute task can become hours, maybe days long, because I’m going to procrastinate on doing it. If managing a bunch of AI agents is a very un-fun way to spend time, then I don’t think it’s the future. If the new way of doing this is more work and more tedium, then why the…

I’ll be that voice I guess - I have fun “vibe coding”. I’m a professional software engineer in Silicon Valley, and I’m fortunate to have been able to work on household-name consumer products across my career. I definitely know how to do “real” professional work “at scale” or whatever. Point is, I can do real work and understand things on my own, and I can generally review code and guide architecture and all that jazz…

>because I love creating things that I and others could use, and I don’t care about “solving the puzzle” type satisfaction from writing code.

Please don't take offense to this, but it sounds like you just don't like building software? It seems like the end goal is what excites you, not the process.

I think for many of us who prefer to write code ourselves, the relationship we have with building software is for the craft/intellectual stimulation. The working product is cool of course, but the real joy is knowing how to do something new.

Re: Vibe engineering

#632

Post by timcobb »

eboynyc32 wrote: post #630
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…

[flagged]

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Vibe engineering

#633

Post by b112 »

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…

I remember reading a sci-fi book, where time was.. sharded? And people from different times were thrust together. I think it was a Phoenician army, which had learned to ride and battle bareback.

And were introduced to the stability of stirrups and saddle.

They were like daemons on those stirrup equipped horses. They had all the agility of wielding weapons and engaging in battle by hanging onto mane, and body with legs, yet now had (to them) a crazy easy and stable platform.

When the battle came, the Phoenicians just tore through those armies who had grown up with the stirrup. There was no comparison in skill or capability.

(Note: I'm positive some of the above may be wrong, but can't find the story and so am just stating it as best able)

My point is, are we in that age? Are we the last skilled, deeply knowledgeable coders?

I grew up learning to write eeproms on burners via the C64. Writing machine language because my machines were too slow otherwise. Needing to find information from massive paper manuals. I had to work it all out myself often, because no internet no code examples, just me thinking of how things could be done. Another person who grew up with some of the same tools and computers, once said we are the last generation to understand the true, full stack.

Now I wonder, is it the same with coding?

Are we it?

The end?

Re: Vibe engineering

#634

Post by jjk166 »

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…

> 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.

Sounds like big money to be made in improving UX

Re: Vibe engineering

#635

Post by skeeter2020 »

We've already 90% killed the word "engineer" by applying the title to someone who completes a 6 week bootcamp; this should pretty much finish it off. I don't see much engineering in the list of benefits; mostly seem like administration, and it's even referenced so why not call it "vibe management"? AI seems far closer to replacing mid-senior managers than it does developers.

Re: Vibe engineering

#636

Post by pron »

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

So the role of a coding agent is to challenge me to play in hard mode?

And suppose getting developers to not lie or hide important information is on me, what should I do to get an LLM to not do that?

Re: Vibe engineering

#637

Post by VBprogrammer »

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…

I really hope you are right here, and to be honest it does reflect my limited experience with where I've used AI so far.

But I'm also not ready to bet the farm on it. Seriously considering taking our savings and equity out of our house in a London adjacent area, and moving to a lower cost of living area, so that we're practically debt free. At that point we can survive on a full time minimum wage job, anything more than that is a bonus.

Re: Vibe engineering

#638

Post by alickz »

steveklabnik wrote: post #594
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.

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.

Agreed

Infallibility is an unrealistic bar to mark LLMs against

Re: Vibe engineering

#639

Post by wartywhoa23 »

fifilura wrote: post #169
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…

Yes. The first programmers used computers as a necessity to get things done. Difficult mathematical calculations, a fancy control system. This is where we should be. Using computers to solve problems. Not just "doing programming". Raise your head, look towards the horizon.

Yes, and forget about ownership of anything too. Only rental, only hardcore, because life is but an experience, spread your wings and fly, weeee, towards our hyperprofits and your prozac dreams!

AI threads on HN reek of venture capital agendas so bad it's unbearable.

Re: Vibe engineering

#640

Post by Huppie »

conesus wrote: post #575
Huppie wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'best' trick I learned from someone over here when working with Claude Code is to very regularly go back a few steps in your context (esc esc -> pick something a few steps up) and say something like "yeah, I already did this myself, now continue and do Y" It results helps keep the context clean while still keeping the initial context I provided (usually with documentation and initial plan setup) at the core of th…

Now that's dangerous to do because the conversation history in Claude Code now also reverts the code to that point. So while this technique may have worked in the past, it no longer works.

Works fine. Reverting the code too is an option you can choose.
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