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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

#41

Post by Insanity »

mohsen1 wrote: post #31

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…

I'm also experimenting with it more and more. Now I'm trying to create a 2D side-scrolling shooter with it, running in the browser. When it was relatively small, it did a good job. As the codebase and docs/ files that I'm using get larger it starts hallucinating, especially when the context gets at about 50% usage (Codex w/ gpt5.5). As in, it'll literally forget to update parts of the code.

e.g, I change velocity of player to '200' and of bullets to '300', and it only updated the bullet velocity. Then told me the player was already 'at the correct value' even though it was set to 150. Things like that.. :)

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

#42

Post by wavemode »

xienze wrote: post #26

> 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…

You're comparing paying $20 for an AI plumber to paying hundreds/thousands for a traditional plumber.

But that's not what the author is talking about in that passage you quoted. What he's saying is that, if you can pay $20 for an AI plumber, then it stands to reason that eventually you will be able to pay $30 to a company that manages AI plumbers for you, so that you don't even have to go to the trouble of supervising the plumber. Most people will choose the $30.

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

#43

Post by empath75 »

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…

> 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

--

It's just as likely that people will be surprised that we used to have billions of lines of human generated code, that no LLM ever approved.

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

#45

Post by xantronix »

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #11
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).

The market is hardly as rational as people would like to hope it is, though it does at least have its own twisted sort of internal consistency.

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

#47

Post by hrldcpr »

cortesoft wrote: post #19
bulbar wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think they're being sarcastic, saying that rewrites from scratch have rarely worked well (whether done by AI or humans).

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

#48

Post by hasbot »

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"

We can do this today too (but definitely hopefully future LLMs make better architectural decisions). With Claude, I've been working on an application for the last 2 months. I didn't have a great vision of what I wanted when I started but I didn't want that to slow me down. The architecture is terrible - Claude separated some functionality into different classes but did a bad job at it and created a big ball of mud. Now that I finally have my vision locked down and implemented (albeit poorly), it'd be a great time to throw it away and start over. It'd be interesting to see the result and see how long it takes.

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

#49

Post by drfloyd51 »

It is pure arrogance to expect that machines will never be able to code as good as a skilled human.

And AI generated code should be different than human code. AI has infinite memory for details. AI doesn’t need organizational patterns like classes. Potentially AI can write code that is more performant than any human.

Will it look like garbage? Sure. Will the code be more suited to the task? Yes.

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

#50

Post by jazzypants »

gabriela_c wrote: post #13

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 ma…

I find that the best thing about generating documentation with LLM's is that it gets me angry enough to rewrite it correctly.

"Ugh, no! Why would you say it like that? That's not even how it works! Now, I need to write a full paragraph instead of a short snippet to make sure that no future agents get confused in the same way."

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