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Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

arxiv.org

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

#121

Post by MikeTheGreat »

whynotminot wrote: post #59
tikimcfee wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this. Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired th…

It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

I forget where I saw this (a Medium post, somewhere) but someone summed this up as "I didn't sign up for this just to be a tech priest for the machine god".

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

#122

Post by johnsmith1840 »

tikimcfee wrote: post #42
_cenw wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone else getting more mentally exhausted by this? I get more done, but I also miss the relaxing code typing in the middle of the process.

Ya know, I have to admit feeling something like this. Normally, the amount of stuff I put together in a work day offers a sense of completion or even a bit of a dopamine bump because of a "job well done". With this recent work I've been doing, it's instead felt like I've been spending a multiplier more energy communicating intent instead of doing the work myself; that communication seems to be making me more tired th…

This is why I think LLMs will make us all a LOT smarter. Raw code made it so we stopped heavily thinking in between but now it's just 100% the most intense thought processes all day long.

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

#123

Post by mkoubaa »

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. :)

Don't care have too much to do must automate away my today responsibilities so I can do more tomorrow trvst the plqn

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

#125

Post by simonw »

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…

Most of the stuff I'm talking about here came out in November. There hasn't been much time for professional teams to build new things with it yet, especially given the holidays!

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

#126

Post by zeristor »

dheera wrote: post #35
simonw wrote: post #33

This is pretty recent - the survey they ran (99 respondents) was August 18 to September 23 2025 and the field observations (watching developers for 45 minute then a 30 minute interview, 13 participants) were August 1 to October 3. The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one mention of Sonnet 4.5.) This is notable because a lot of acade…

> academic papers take 6-12 months to come out It takes about 6 months to figure out how to get LaTeX to position figures where you want them, and then another 6 months to fight with reviewers

Couldn't AI help with the LaTeX?

Cutting it down to 6 minutes

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

#127

Post by AYBABTME »

It feels like we're doing another lift to a higher level of abstraction. Whereas we had "automatic programming" and "high level programming languages" free us from assembly, where higher level abstractions could be represented without the author having to know or care about the assembly (and it took decades for the switch to happen), we now once again get pulled up another layer.

We're in the midst of another abstraction level becoming the working layer - and that's not a small layer jump but a jump to a completely different plane. And I think once again, we'll benefit from getting tools that help us specify the high level concepts we intend, and ways to enforce that the generated code is correct - not necessarily fast or efficient but at least correct - same as compilers do. And this lift is happening on a much more accelerated timeline.

The problem of ensuring correctness of the generated code across all the layers we're now skipping is going to be the crux of how we manage to leverage LLM/agentic coding.

Maybe Cursor is TurboPascal.

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

#128

Post by llmslave2 »

remich wrote: post #101
llmslave2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason for the varying claims and predictions is because developers have wildly different standards for what constitutes working code. For the developers with a lower threshold, AI is like crack to them because gen ai's output is similar to what they would produce, and it really is a 10x speedup. For others, especially those who have to fix and maintain that code, it's more like a 10x slowdown. Hence why…

Have you considered that it's a bit dismissive to assume that developers who find use out of AI tools necessarily approve of worse code than you do, or have lower standards? It's fine to be a skeptic. Or to have tried out these tools and found that they do not work well for your particular use case at this moment in time. But you shouldn't assume that people who do get value out of them are not as good at the job as…

I never said anything about being worse, dumber, and definitely not slower. And keep in mind worse is subjective - if something doesn't require edge case handling or correctness, bugs can be tolerated etc, then something with those properties isn't worse is it?

I'm just saying that since there is such a wide range of experiences with the same tools, it's probably likely that developers vary on their evaluations of the output.

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

#129

Post by senshan »

zkmon wrote: post #45

I haven't seen the definition of an agent, in the paper. Do they differentiate agents from generic online chat interfaces?

Page 2: We define agentic tools or agents as AI tools integrated into an IDE or a terminal that can manipulate the code directly (i.e., excluding web-based chat interfaces)

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

#130

Post by dinkumthinkum »

cheema33 wrote: post #117
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?

Does the rest of the world want to make money in a way not involving digging ditches? I feel like people from developing countries that spend 18 hours a day studying, giving their entire childhood to some standardized test, may not want yo be rewarded with no job prospects. Maybe that’s a crazy position.
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