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Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#11

Post by jimmyjazz14 »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

If that is the case market forces would likely favor hand written code and all the slop will be forgotten (unless the slop works fine and is stable).

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#12

Post by jf22 »

jstummbillig wrote: post #5
singpolyma3 wrote: post #3

I think I'm just too opinionated to go there. If I see something that works fine, but isn't the way I'd do it, it doesn't matter if a human or an LLM wrote it I'm still in there making it match my vision.

That's not how most organizations work, AI or not.

What do you mean?

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#13

Post by gabriela_c »

Claude often does things in more detail, and even better, than I would, in the first pass. But I don't understand how anybody stands comments generated by an LLM?

It's seriously the thing that worries (and bothers) me the most. I almost never let unedited LLM comments pass. At a minimum.

Most of the time, I use my own vibe-coded tool to run multiple GitHub-PR-review-style reviews, and send them off to the agent to make the code look and work fine.

It also struggles with doing things the idiomatic way for huge codebases, or sometimes it's just plain wrong about why something works, even if it gets it right.

And I say this despite the fact that I don't really write much code by hand anymore, only the important ones (if even!) or the interesting ones.

Also, don't even get me started on AI-generated READMEs... I use Claude to refine my Markdown or automatically handle dark/light-mode, but I try to write everything myself, because I can't stand what it generates.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#14

Post by kurthr »

ativzzz wrote: post #10
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"

"Write me a really cool game, that will make me lots of money, fast!"

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#15

Post by fnoef »

ativzzz wrote: post #10
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"

"Make sure to double check everything, and MAKE NO MISTAKES!!!"

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#16

Post by jcgrillo »

> It used to be if you found a GitHub repository with a hundred commits and a good readme and automated tests and stuff, you could be pretty sure that the person writing that had put a lot of care and attention into that project.

I think this highlights a problem that has always existed under the surface, but it's being brought into the light by proliferation of vibeslop and openclaw and their ilk. Even in the beforetimes you could craft a 100.0% pure, correct looking github repo that had never stood the test of production. Even if you had a test suite that covers every branch and every instruction, without putting the code in production you aren't going to uncover all the things your test suite didn't--performance issues, security issues, unexpected user behavior, etc.

As an observer looking at this repo, I have no way to tell. It's got hundreds of tests, hundreds of commits, dozens of stars... how am I to know nobody has ever actually used it for anything?

I don't know how to solve this problem, but it seems like there's a pretty obvious tooling gap here. A very similar problem is something like "contributor reputation", i.e. the plague of drive-by AI generated PRs from people (or openclaws) you've never seen before. Stars and number of commits aren't good enough, we need more.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#17

Post by bulbar »

ativzzz wrote: post #10
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"

Will work just as good as today or 20 years ago.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#18

Post by ai_slop_hater »

suzzer99 wrote: post #4
singpolyma3 wrote: post #3

I think I'm just too opinionated to go there. If I see something that works fine, but isn't the way I'd do it, it doesn't matter if a human or an LLM wrote it I'm still in there making it match my vision.

100%. I don't think any senior programmer ever looks at another developer's code and says, "Oh yeah, that's just the way I'd do it."

So you are going to waste everyone's time getting another developer to write code the way you want? This resonates with me because at my company I get this all the time. At that point, you might as well close my PR and do it yourself, whatever way you want. I really like the advice from the book 0 2 1, to assign different areas of responsibility to people, so that there is no conflict.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#19

Post by cortesoft »

bulbar wrote: post #17
ativzzz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By then, the fix will be easy. Fire up the latest LLM, point it at your codebase and tell it "rewrite this from scratch. do it well. fix the architecture mistakes"

Will work just as good as today or 20 years ago.

Are you suggesting AI coding was as good 20 years ago as it is today?

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#20

Post by hirvi74 »

I'd be lying if I said I was not worried about the future. I am not necessarily worried in the sense that there will be some grave, impeding doom that awaits the future of humanity.

Rather, I just feel like I have to constantly remind myself of the impermanence of all things. Like snow, from water come to water gone.

Perhaps I put too much of my identity in being a programmer. Sure, LLMs cannot replace most us in their current state, but what about 5 years, 10 years, ..., 50 years from now? I just cannot help be feel a sense of nihilism and existential dread.

Some might argue that we will always be needed, but I am not certain I want to be needed in such a way. Of course, no one is taking hand-coding away from me. I can hand-code all I want on my own time, but occupationally that may be difficult in the future. I have rambled enough, but all and all, I do not think I want to participate in this society anymore, but I do not know how to escape it either.

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