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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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651–660 of 759 posts

Re: Vibe engineering

#651

Post by alickz »

s_dev wrote: post #322
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 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. Tools always empower those with knowledge further than those without knowledge.

Agreed

LLMs are a force multiplier

Re: Vibe engineering

#652

Post by alickz »

ruszki wrote: post #238
kmijyiyxfbklao wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managers with development skills are almost always better, because they can dive into the details if there's ever a problem.

That’s true, however the current vibe coding ecosystem is clearly not written in this mindset. You will have a hard time to dive into anything if you previously generated 2k LOC/hour, which is absolutely possible. Typing was never the bottleneck, understanding, and knowing that you did something well was always the real bottleneck. LLMs make this even worse. You can move Jira tickets to done faster with it, but even…

>LLMs make this even worse

Not in my experience

Better documentation, more test cases, and an NLP interface to query the code

Less cognitive load, more complete mental models

>even bad developers can do that many times compared to better ones, because for example they mindlessly copy-paste StackOverflow answers whose half of the code is absolutely not necessary

Maybe LLMs, much like StackOverflow, make good devs better and bad devs worse

Like a force multiplier for good practices and bad practices

Re: Vibe engineering

#653

Post by herval »

pron wrote: post #636
herval wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

no, the point is LLMs will behave the same way humans you have to manage do (there's obviously differences - eg LLMs tend to forget context more often than most humans, but also they tend to know a lot more than the average human). So some of the same skills that'll help you manage humans will also help you get more consistency out of LLMs.

Re: Vibe engineering

#654

Post by criemen »

oblio wrote: post #435
rhetocj23 wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very curious to hear responses about this too

The problem with this is that software engineering is a very unorganized and fashion/emotion driven domain. We don't have reliable productivity numbers for basically... anything. I that I'm more productive with statically typed languages but I haven't seen large scale, reliable studies. Same with unit tests, integration tests, etc. And then there are all the types of software engineering: web frontend, web API, mobil…

I wanted to point you at https://neverworkintheory.org/ which attempted to bridge the gap between academia and software engineering. Turns out the site shut down, because (quoting their retrospective)

> Twelve years after It Will Never Work in Theory launched, the real challenge in software engineering research is not what to do about ChatGPT or whatever else Silicon Valley is gushing about at the moment. Rather, it is how to get researchers to focus on problems that practitioners care about and practitioners to pay attention to what researchers discover. This was true when we started, it was true 10 years ago, and it remains true today.

The entire retrospective [1] is well worth a read, and unfortunately reinforcing your exact point about software development being fashion/emotion driven.

[1] https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/so/2024/03/10424425/1...

Re: Vibe engineering

#655

Post by wartywhoa23 »

mekoka wrote: post #607
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 i…

That all things develop only so much before they degrade into overdevelopment was a very well understood phenomenon for ancient Taoists, and it will be the death of the modern Blackrock/Vanguard owned world which is absolutely ignorant of this principle.

Re: Vibe engineering

#656

Post by asadm »

sph wrote: post #173
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…

Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years. But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line commit…

hand crafted code? this isn't some rich downtown store to fool old rich people.

code is code. if it works, nobody gives a shit. Market will adapt to be fault-tolerant. Look at all the value created by javascript.

Also, FYI, I am writing some of most efficient code using AI.

Re: Vibe engineering

#657

Post by saberience »

simonw wrote: post #2

Just added this note to the end, as part of my justification for picking such an obviously stupid term for this: > I’ve tried in the past to get terms like AI-assisted programming to stick, with approximately zero success. May as well try rubbing some vibes on it and see what happens.

Question, why is it seemingly so super important for you to coin a term for this?

Especially a term which comes across as so demeaning and devaluing to engineers (like me and yourself!)

I absolutely do not want my non-engineer friends and colleagues think I am "vibe engineering", it sounds trivial and dumbs down the discipline.

I personally believe being an engineer of some kind requires work, learning, patience, discipline, and we should be proud of being engineers. There's no way in hell I would go around and saying I'm a "vibe engineer" now. It would be like going around and saying I'm a vibe architect! Who would want to live in a skyscraper designed by a "vibe architect" ??

Re: Vibe engineering

#658

Post by codyb »

anthonypasq wrote: post #647
codyb wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gains seem to be leveling to me but I'm not using them as much as others. Still seems like people are saying the same things when the first Claude came out. I can get it do stuff if I'm very specific, stand over it's shoulder, know exactly what I want, break it down into small chunks. The thing for me is... at that point, writing the code's the least time consuming part of the process half the time. I think for t…

i do love it when people opine on things they literally dont even use...

I'm still sitting here reading a lot of code generated by it, but sure.

Looks a lot like the code I was reading generated by it a long time ago.

Re: Vibe engineering

#659

Post by closeparen »

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…

>accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of tools.

Tech spent the last 10 years drilling into engineers' heads that scaling your impact is not about writing more or better code, but about influencing the work of other engineers through collaboration, process, documentation, etc. Even the non-managerial "senior IC" tracks are mostly about doing this with greater and and greater numbers of people. I wonder if we will start to see recognition in career tracks for people who are actually just extraordinarily productive by themselves or in small groups, or if you'll pretty much just have to be a startup founder to get paid for that.

Re: Vibe engineering

#660

Post by wartywhoa23 »

skor wrote: post #329

Don't worry — if we all have access to the same tools, the playing field is level. What sets you apart are the human qualities. Employers and clients want to be at the top, same as before LLMs. The market is large, and there's room for everyone. Don't be afraid of someone without any/little engineering knowledge making something, they were already copy/pasting code from SO before LLMs.

The field is all but level with all the money behind the AI.
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