Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

691–700 of 759 posts

Re: Vibe engineering

#691

Post by IAmGraydon »

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…

LLMs are very much like WYSIWYG web editors of the early 2000s like Dreamweaver. They provide a human interface layer that abstracts away the coding, and neither does a particularly good job of it. When WYSIWYG first became a thing, there was talk that it would upend the web development industry. It did not.

Re: Vibe engineering

#692

Post by gls2ro »

holbrad wrote: post #667
hollowturtle wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good lord I wish I could have as many certainties as well, one point at a time: * There is no objective reality, there isn't one in physics, it's just a non argument * "LLM's help a damn lot in speed of development" That may be your experience and my whole point was arguing that speed may not matter * "Genie is out of the bag, you have to go with the flow, adapt or else" I choose else if this the apex of the argument

I'm genuinely baffled by the assertion that there isn't objective reality.

If you go down in physics you might discover that the reality seems to be composed a lot more by probabilities. An objective reality built on probabilities does not seem so objective afterall.

Here is a fun think to try: demonstrate that you and me are seeing the same color in the same way? You might find some papers trying to prove it but you will se they are all based on subjective answers of people.

So while at macro level the reality seems hard and objective at the micro level it is not.

Re: Vibe engineering

#693

Post by cadamsdotcom »

DenisM wrote: post #528
cadamsdotcom wrote: post #120

A better term is agentic coding, agentic software engineering, etc. rather than being vibe based. My process starts from a Claude Code plan, whose first step is to write a spec. I use TDD, and enforce my "unspoken rules of code quality" using a slew of generated tools. One tiny tool blocks code which violates our design system. Another tool blocks code which violates our separation of layering - this forces the HTTP…

> Another tool blocks code which violates our separation of layering - this forces the HTTP route handler code to only access the database via service layer. Is that an llm agent or some other type of tool (e.g. language service or build toolset)?

When I say "tool" I really mean a python script. This particular one is ~100 lines of python with a main() method, that Claude Code wrote in a single shot, that I then committed to the repo in a scripts/ directory. That lets me include it in pre-commit hooks, run it when I run the tests, and have it run during CI.

A 100 line script finishes in milliseconds and burns no tokens. So you can run it hundreds of times per day.

The mindset is: will you need repeatability? If so, have the LLM write code, because code gives you determinism.

Re: Vibe engineering

#694

Post by simonw »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #691
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…

LLMs are very much like WYSIWYG web editors of the early 2000s like Dreamweaver. They provide a human interface layer that abstracts away the coding, and neither does a particularly good job of it. When WYSIWYG first became a thing, there was talk that it would upend the web development industry. It did not.

One of the main points of my article was meant to be that LLMs don't abstract away the code, at least not if you're trying to use them for professional software development work as opposed to vibe coded prototypes and toy projects.

Re: Vibe engineering

#695

Post by drudolph914 »

pron wrote: post #551
robjellinghaus wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience with Claude Code and Sonnet, it is absolutely possible to have architectural and design-oriented conversations about the work, at an entirely different and higher level than using a (formerly) high-level programming language. I have been able to learn new systems and frameworks far faster with Claude than with any previous system I have used. It definitely does require close attention to detect mista…

Indeed, I successfully use LLMs for research, and they're an improvement because old-school search isn't very reliable either. But as to the 80-20 tradeoff on other tasks, the problem isn't that the tool is wrong 20% of the time, but that it's not trustworthy 100% of the time. I have to check the work. Maybe that's still valuable, but just how valuable that is depends on many factors, some of which are very domain-de…

80-20 is also a gracious ratio, my experience it’s more like 65-35

Re: Vibe engineering

#696

Post by fifilura »

wartywhoa23 wrote: post #639
fifilura wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think rather your post summarizes AI threads on HN.

Capitalism is what it is, and has been so for the last 200 years. The alternatives have always proven worse.

In my (small) country we have had many crises like this. Textile industry, shipbuilding. But we have survived by not looking back but looking into the future. And given people the right conditions for retraining.

Re: Vibe engineering

#697

Post by GoatInGrey »

simonw wrote: post #549
emil-lp wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simon is a salesman. Obviously he knows how to phrase things.

I wish I was! I'm pretty terrible at sales. It's a skill I respect and do not have.

> Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.

> Pay me to send you less!

Re: Vibe engineering

#698

Post by teiferer »

cpursley wrote: post #317
teiferer wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales I'm feeling the same. The moves I'm considering are 1. Landscaping 2. Carpentry 3. Small scale agriculture (All made easier by a cushion of investments that are most of the way to passive income, so the new thing doesn't really have to make me that much money.)

My father runs a commercial landscaping company with 15 employees. His truck fleet insurance went up 35% just this year. His light industrial facility that he operates out of property taxes went up 55% last year. All of his commercial clients are cheaping out on all the little things that used to make extra money (pine straw, seasonal flowers, etc.). He’s having to deal with poorly educated staff who are constantly b…

I hear you man. Didn't intend to paint a rosy image of hard working landscapers. What I meant was do it more like a hobby that pays a little on the side. Doesn't have to be much, just pay some bills and let me do sth I like. Cause supervising a bunch of immature LLM agents is not something I'll like to do all day, I'd rather trim trees and plant flowers on the cheap.

Re: Vibe engineering

#699

Post by rkomorn »

spyckie2 wrote: post #510
muldvarp wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is claiming that any of the alternatives are better jobs than software engineering has been for the last 20 years. We don't live in the last 20 years anymore and software engineering is either becoming a different (worse) job or simply vanishing.

But it’s necessary to get confirmation against the hope that the grass is indeed not greener on the other side.

If you don't like the grass where you are, maybe the question of whether it's really greener somewhere else doesn't matter.

Maybe you need to change pasture no matter what.

Re: Vibe engineering

#700

Post by rkomorn »

teiferer wrote: post #698
cpursley wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My father runs a commercial landscaping company with 15 employees. His truck fleet insurance went up 35% just this year. His light industrial facility that he operates out of property taxes went up 55% last year. All of his commercial clients are cheaping out on all the little things that used to make extra money (pine straw, seasonal flowers, etc.). He’s having to deal with poorly educated staff who are constantly b…

I hear you man. Didn't intend to paint a rosy image of hard working landscapers. What I meant was do it more like a hobby that pays a little on the side. Doesn't have to be much, just pay some bills and let me do sth I like. Cause supervising a bunch of immature LLM agents is not something I'll like to do all day, I'd rather trim trees and plant flowers on the cheap.

I'm all for it but maybe with caution.

I bailed out of a FAANG job to cook in restaurants in the Bay Area and it was very double-edged. I gave up after a year for a variety of reasons.

The actual work was definitely more enjoyable.

"Paying the bills", on the other hand, actually took a lot of money (and I had a laughably small mortgage and two people sharing it at the time).

I also worked way more hours (30-40% of which were unpaid because yay fine dining), and it was physically way more brutal.

But then again, almost 10 years later, I'm back to the idea of opening a place of my own because the current tech landscape really doesn't attract me at all anymore and I can't get myself to last in it.

Post reply on HN