I am experimenting with writing en entire TypeScript compiler[1] with AI assistant. I've spent 4 months on it already. It might not be successful at the end of the day but my thinking is that if LLMs are going to write a lot of the code I better learn how this can and can not work. I've learned a lot from this project already. I think we're still in charge of design and big ideas even if all of the code is written by AI
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
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Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#32> And that feels about right to me. I can plumb my house if I watch enough YouTube videos on plumbing. I would rather hire a plumber. I don't buy this argument at all. I think if we could pay $20/month to a service that would send over a junior plumber/carpenter/electrician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft, did the right thing the majority of the time, and we could observe and direct them, we'd all sign up…
I literally do pay $20 a month to have a plumber service on call.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#33Vibe Coding (and LLMs) did not create undisciplined engineering organizations or engineers. They exposed and accelerated them.
Plenty of engineers have loose (or no!) standards and practices over how they write coee. Similarly, plenty of engineering teams have weak and loose standards over how code gets pushed to production. This concept isn't new, it's just a lot easier for individuals and teams who have never really adhered to any sort of standards in their SDLC to produce a lot more code and flesh out ideas.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#34Agentic engineering? That reads to me a little like amateur oncologist. How are you defining engineering?
Can agentic engineers adhere to a similar code of ethics that a professional engineer is sworn to uphold?
https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/nspe-code-ethics-engineer...
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#35> The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on.
> If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resize your images”... I’m not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote.
The distance of accountability of the output from its producer is an important metric. Who will be held accountable for which output: that's important to maintain and not feel the "guilt".
So, organizations would need to focus on better and more granular building incentives and punishment mechanisms for large-scale software projects.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#36Earlier 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"
"Make sure to double check everything, and MAKE NO MISTAKES!!!"
"YOU'RE A SENIOR SOFTWARE ENGINEER!!!"
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
But I assume you don't go and change all your co-workers code just because they didn't do it how you would have done it?
Even the most toxic places I've worked that kind of behavior would totally get you canned.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#38> And that feels about right to me. I can plumb my house if I watch enough YouTube videos on plumbing. I would rather hire a plumber. I don't buy this argument at all. I think if we could pay $20/month to a service that would send over a junior plumber/carpenter/electrician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft, did the right thing the majority of the time, and we could observe and direct them, we'd all sign up…
I literally do pay $20 a month to have a plumber service on call.
And that includes materials, labor, and will be there the instant you need them?
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#39> If you can go from producing 200 lines of code a day to 2,000 lines of code a day, what else breaks? The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code. And now it doesn’t.
It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#40People 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…
There is nothing in the post to support the statement. An interesting personal confession, but it does not establish that vibe coding and agentic engineering are converging as a general phenomenon.
As a piece of meat, I look forward to charge rates of $10,000 an hour, to fix code out the vibe code generation.