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Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

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Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#111

Post by William_BB »

simonw wrote: post #102
drbojingle wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the difference between using llms now vs the first half of 2025 among the best users?

Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex. The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March. I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885

Ok I will bite.

Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it.

However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain specific code. From personal experience, coding agents simply don't work at that scale the same way they do for hobby projects. Over the past year or two, I did not see any significant improvement from any of the newest models.

Building a slightly bigger hobby project is not even close to making these agents work at industrial scale.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#112

Post by cheema33 »

christophilus wrote: post #89
simonw wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I can prove it, but ~25 years ago building software without open source sucked . You had to build everything from scratch! It took months to get even the most basic things up and running. I think open source is the single most important productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed. Automated testing is a close second. Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed without open source…

25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.

> 25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.

If that were too, wouldn't we all be using VB today?

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#113

Post by agentifysh »

tikhonj wrote: post #84
agentifysh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

almost all employers are going to expect you to use AI and produce more with it you can definitely choose not to participate and give the opportunity someone who are happy to use AI and still have fun with it.

most organizations have awful leadership, sure but that doesn't mean you can't (or shouldn't) work around it

have you tried telling your boss you won't use the AI anymore while the rest of the team uses it ?

how do you imagine such conversation to play out im curious

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#114

Post by lifetimerubyist »

llmslave2 wrote: post #57
lifetimerubyist wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you realize you're just begging and coaxing a human to better beg and coax a machine to output working code - when you could just beg and coax the machine yourself.

At least I'd be the one interfacing with a human instead of a machine :P

[dead]

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#115

Post by agentifysh »

zem wrote: post #88
agentifysh wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure unemployment is also a choice

fun work > tedious work > unemployment not sure why so many people feel like factoring fun into what job you want to take is so unthinkable, or that it's just a false dichotomy between the ideal job and unemployment

you are describing the ideal which is not a reality for many many people as it is not common

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#116

Post by aussieguy1234 »

simonw wrote: post #43
websiteapi wrote: post #15

we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those paying the salaries. :)

We've been giving our work away to each other for free as open source to help improve each other's productivity for 30+ years now and that's only made our profession more valuable.

This makes sense. Imagine PHP or NodeJS without a framework, or front end development without React. Your projects would take much longer to build. The time saved with the open source frameworks and libraries is more than what an AI agent can save you.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#117

Post by cheema33 »

websiteapi wrote: post #15

we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those paying the salaries. :)

> we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance.

Should we be trying to put the genie back in the bottle? If not, what exactly are you suggesting?

Even if we all agreed to stop using AI tools today, what about the rest of world? Will everybody agree to stop using it? Do you think that is even a remote possibility?

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#120

Post by [deleted] »

William_BB wrote: post #111
simonw wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex. The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March. I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885

Ok I will bite. Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it. However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain…

[deleted]
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