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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

701–710 of 759 posts

Re: Vibe engineering

#701
post #549

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.

Just want to say that as an AI engineer, you and the Latent Space folks are doing work that is extremely useful to me. Without y'all, I'd be forced to doom scroll on X to catch up on the latest developments.

I wanted to explicitly highlight the utility of what you do because of surrounding comments that suggest/imply otherwise.

Thank you Simon!

Re: Vibe engineering

#702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cr…

I understand where you're coming from (and I don't take offense), but based on your reply, I don't really feel like my views came across.

When I was a student, I took classes on chip and circuit design. One class, the professor had us work on all these complex circuits to do things like flash lights and produce various signals with analog circuits. The next lesson, he had us replace all that complex work with a microcontroller and 20 lines of C - "the way it's done in industry". The students mourned the loss of the "real" engineering because the circuit that required skill and careful math was replaced by a cheap chip and some trivial software. Their entire concept of the craft was destroyed when they were given a tool that replaced the "fun parts" with some trivial and comparatively boring work. That same concept of replacing circuits with digital logic scaled up is how extremely complex and well engineered circuits like FPGAs work.

Maybe it was just my earlier wording, but I think there is joy in the act of turning your ideas into something real - creation - not just having something real. Shopping is not building. Importantly, it takes careful thought and practice and a learned instinct to engineer and create things correctly, and do it repeatably, as the original article discusses. Craft is about practice, and learning, and trying something new with what you've learned.

If LLMs mean that I'll never have to write another trivial set of methods to store a JSON object in a SQL database, I don't think I'll lose any project-wide joy. Expressing creativity, and trying new things is what's great, not typing something that's been done a million times before. It's a tired analogy, but I do think of it more like a level of abstraction, like the LLM is a "compiler" for design docs or specifications. For myself, I usually don't see a difference between a prompt instructing an LLM to write some function, and the code for the function itself - in same way that a method in Java, bytecode, and asm are basically the same (with some caveats here around complexity and originality).

Re: Vibe engineering

#703
post #652
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bett…

The exact people who said to me that I’m using LLMs wrongly, and showed their code, showed me bad code. So let’s say, that “more documentation, which is unnecessary most time, ie noise, more test cases, which test not necessarily what they should, and an NLP interface which lies from time-to-time”, and we agree. LLM generated code is noisy as hell, for no good reason. Maybe, it’s good for you, and your type of work. I need to provide way better code than that. I don’t know why we pretend that “good code”, “good documentation”, “good tests” etc are the same for everybody.

Re: Vibe engineering

#704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, keep looking into the future and enjoy your "capitalism" then

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_ha...

Re: Vibe engineering

#705
post #692

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ma…

It's an objective reality. Even at quantum level the known laws of nature hold. Even if there is uncertainty, nature is predictable in following the laws of physics.

And ofc at macro level we live in a very objective reality. This is the basis of science.

Re: Vibe engineering

#706
Beautifully put. This puts into words what I was unable to say to those who claim all ai is useless and can only produce slop, if the human is TRULY in control it’s an entirely different ball game. Thank you for this.

Re: Vibe engineering

#707

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 sorry you feel that way but that’s a surprising experience, I find flow states easier managing agents than actually coding. Each of course, to their own. Is it possible you were reaching the end of your tether anyway in the coding space? Feel free to slap that accusation down if it’s unfair.

Re: Vibe engineering

#708

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…

I agree, “vibe” continues the idea of “going on vibes” rather than facts. This form of engineering is scrupulous and complete. It doesn’t fit.

Re: Vibe engineering

#709
We might just have to accept that it’s software engineering. Not vibe engineering, just engineering. Proper engineering has never shied away from using smart tools, it’s about ownership, accountability, planning, etc etc and you’re still doing all that. If you sign off properly on everything, it’s yours. It’s engineering, that’s it.

Smart tools have existed forever, or we’d all be coding in assembly still. As long as we take ownership of the code and the result that’s it.

Re: Vibe engineering

#710

When pigeons are offered random rewards from a treat dispenser, they start doing all kinds of funny little dances and movements because they think the rewards are in response to their actions.

I don’t know what you’re trying to imply here but it sounds very strongly like it is put in bad faith.
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