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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#731

Post by dandellion »

unoti wrote: post #554
pron wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Furthermore, techniques of working with agents today may be completely outdated a year from now.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…

> 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. If you’ve be been tasked with leadership of an engineering effort involving multiple engineers and stakeholders you know that this is in fact a crucial part of the role the more senior you get. It is much the same with people: know their limitatio…

Inconsistent performance and frequent lies are a crucial part of the role, really? I've only met a couple of people like that on my career. Interviews go both ways: if I can't establish that the team I'll be working with is composed and managed by honest and competent people, I don't accept their offer. Sometimes it has meant missing out on the highest compensation, but at least I don't deal with lies and inconsistent performance.

Re: Vibe engineering

#733

Post by simonw »

GoatInGrey wrote: post #697
simonw wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Hah, yeah that's genuinely one of my more successful attempts at capitalism.

Re: Vibe engineering

#734

Post by saltcured »

vineyardmike wrote: post #702
jplusequalt wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 micro…

For a lot of folks, the derivation of joy is not as scale-free as seems necessary to move up the hierarchy in this way. The jump in abstraction kills some joy by removing the tangible process. The tactile enjoyment someone gets from knitting is not there when operating a loom, much less when managing someone else who operates the loom.

The change in agency also kills the joy for me. I thrive on abstraction in the language and mathematics sense. But I do not at all enjoy indirection and delegation through unreliable agents. I am not interested in the loss of control and the new risk management task. I would never accept a "stochastic compiler" that offered to optimize my code but with risk of randomly changing the semantics. That determinism in the semantics needs to remain for me to accept a tool as a valid abstraction.

For context, I am a computer scientist by title and a programmer at heart. I got my CS degree from a liberal arts program rather than an engineering school. My temperament is more that of a hands-on artist at an easel or typewriter and not that of a manager of an engineering department. In my long career, I have thrived with peers or betters on collaborative projects. I have zero interest in "advancing" to a managerial role.

But honestly, the loss of control, lack of trust, and associated risk management is a big problem for me. I have rarely delegated work to less skilled or less reliable juniors, and I have never enjoyed that. The scenario of a confidently wrong subordinate is a huge trigger for me. It evokes long term trauma from growing up with a mentally ill family member. It feels like all of the burden of being a caregiver to someone with delusions, but with none of the moral context to make that worth the cost.

Re: Vibe engineering

#735

Post by array_key_first »

herval wrote: post #721
array_key_first wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I want to play in easy mode. Why would I want to play in hard mode? You're trying to sell AI here, right? And the argument is that AI is like hard mode... which developers are already in, but might not be. It's just not a very good sales pitch.

The point you missed entirely, young padawan

Are you going to say the point or are you just going to dance around it?

Re: Vibe engineering

#736

Post by joks »

jappgar wrote: post #719
pron wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know of anyone who would like to work with someone who lies to them over and over, and will never stop. LLMs do certain things better than people, but my point is that there's nothing you can trust them to do. That's fine for research (we don't trust, and don't need to trust, any human or tool to do a fully exhaustive research, anyway), but not for most other work tasks. That's not to say that LLMs can't be u…

Anthropomorphizing LLMs is not going to help anyone. They're not "lying" to you. There's no intent to deceive. I really think that the people who have the hardest time adapting to AI tools are the ones that take everything personally. It's just a text generator, not a colleague.

> It's just a text generator, not a colleague.

The person you are responding to is quite literally making the same point. This entire thread of conversation is in response to the post's author stating that using a coding agent is strongly akin to collaborating with a colleague.

Re: Vibe engineering

#737

Post by uselesswords »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #635

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.

Some would say we killed the word "engineer" when we started applying it to programmers...

Re: Vibe engineering

#738

Post by unoti »

array_key_first wrote: post #681
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

Yes, I want to play in easy mode. Why would I want to play in hard mode? You're trying to sell AI here, right? And the argument is that AI is like hard mode... which developers are already in, but might not be. It's just not a very good sales pitch.

> Yes, I want to play in easy mode. Why would I want to play in hard mode?

Working alone can be much easier than managing others in a team. But also, working in a team can be far more effective if you can figure out how to pull it off.

It's much the same as working with agents. Working alone, without the agents, it's easier to make exactly what you want happen. But working with agents, you can get a lot more done a lot faster-- if you can figure out how to make it happen. This is why you might want hard mode.

Re: Vibe engineering

#739

Post by maplethorpe »

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…

As a thought experiment, do you think it would be just as fun if you were given access to an infinite database of apps, and you were able to search through the database for an existing app that suit your needs, and then it gave it to you?

Or would it no longer be fun, because it no longer feels like creating?

Re: Vibe engineering

#740

Post by selcuka »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #728
selcuka wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we all agree that "mentoring" LLMs is actually a waste of time, please? Sorry, we can't. While it's true that you can't really modify the underlying model, updating your AGENTS.md (or whatever) with your expected coding style, best practices, common gotchas etc is a type of mentoring.

> updating your AGENTS.md (or whatever) with your expected coding style, best practices, common gotchas etc is a type of mentoring We'll have to agree to disagree, because I don't think that has anything remotely in common with mentoring

> We'll have to agree to disagree

Fair enough. But don't you think giving a junior a handbook you wrote is mentoring? They may not be able to memorise it, but they now have a handbook that they can look up things.

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