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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

#71

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

etothet wrote: post #33

Vibe 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 reall…

Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good.

I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster. The best engineers I know were ones who drew on experience and careful consideration and shared critical insights with their team that steered the direction of the system positively.

> Claude, engineer a system for me, but do it good. Thanks!

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

#72

Post by vehemenz »

criddell wrote: post #34

Agentic 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...

The problem of calling what most of us do "engineering" predates LLMs by a good 15-20 years.

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

#73

Post by tyyyy3 »

drfloyd51 wrote: post #49

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.

Your post weeks of pure arrogance. You sound like the bozo’s at Anthropic who made an AI agent for finance and think this is somehow going to provide a huge productivity boost because all they do is a bunch of tick boxing and spreadsheet work.

No, just no.

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

#74

Post by xienze »

wavemode wrote: post #42
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 supervisin…

It's in a section called "Why I’m still not afraid for my career."

The implication here is software engineer jobs are still safe despite basically free labor/material being available to do said jobs because he thinks other people would prefer to pay experienced professionals to do it right at a significantly higher cost. My point is, I think most people will take the low-stakes gamble of having the cheap AI agent do it with self-supervision[0]. He's naive in thinking people are really going to care about artisanal software built by experienced professionals in the future.

0: Even if you subscribe to the "your job will be to supervise the agents" train of thought, you're kinda glossing over the fact that it's probably gonna involve a pretty significant pay cut and the looming problem of "how do new experienced professionals get created if they don't have to/don't need to get their hands dirty"?

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

#75

Post by murukesh_s »

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…

Hello from assembly programmers to present day javascript folks. Joke aside, I sometimes think how VS Code is written in such layers and layers of code - ~200mb of minified code - Java based IDEs were worser with almost 1GB of code (libs/dependencies). And VS Code did beat native editors (Sublime) of its time to dominate now - may be because of the business model (open & free vs freemium). But it does the job quite well IMO. And it enabled swarms of startups to go to market including billion $ wrappers - including Cursor, Antigravity and almost all UI coding agents. I remember backend developers (Java/C++ type) looking down upon Javascript developers as if we are from an inferior planet or something.

How many of us remember that VSCode is actually a browser wrapped inside a native frame?

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

#76

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

nichochar wrote: post #60
dataviz1000 wrote: post #52

Have you noticed that the coding agents get really close to the solution on the first one shot and then require tons of work to get that last 10% or 5%? If we shift the paradigm of how we approach a coding problem, the coding agents can close that gap. Ten years ago every 10 or 15 minutes I would stop coding and start refactoring, testing, and analyzing making sure everything is perfect before proceeding because a bu…

This was often true when writing code manually to be fair. You could get to "something that works" rather fast but it took a long time to 1) evaluate other options (maybe before, maybe after), 2) refine it, 3) test it and build confidence around it. I think your point stands but no one really knows where. The next year or so is going to be everyone trying to figure that out (this is also why we hear a lot of "we need…

When I hire fresh out of college… I can see them coming in and not having the slightest comprehension of the difference of the things that they did in school to get a grade and never touch it again versus a product that is supposed to exist and work for 10+ years.

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

#77

Post by unfunco »

fnoef wrote: post #15
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"

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

Don't hallucinate!

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

#78

Post by jazzypants »

drfloyd51 wrote: post #49

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.

I find it hard to believe that code with unnecessary cruft and repetition is "more suited to the task". I've literally deleted hundreds of unnecessary or unused functions at this point. The only way I can agree is if "more suited" means, "it's wearing multiple suits for no reason".

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

#79

Post by devin »

sesky wrote: post #58
devin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wishful thinking. The force of the market is "number go up". Quality increasingly has less and less of a role in the equation. You will eat your slop, and you will like it. It will be the only choice you have.

But the quality of code was already very bad due to market forces. Most code at large companies is notoriously poor despite the talent density, because the incentives are not there to tackle tech debt or improve code quality. With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the mo…

The model is optimized in a different way to "partially meet expectations". Sycophancy coupled with only really "knowing" what it has been trained on assure a different kind of mediocrity.

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

#80

Post by jitler »

johnbarron wrote: post #40
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…

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.

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