Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 958 posts

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

#111

Post by [deleted] »

moregrist wrote: post #99
ilikebits wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOC is useful here not because it's a metric for output but because it's a metric for _understandability_. Reviewing 200 lines is a very different workload than reviewing 2000.

It’s still a bad metric. I have worked with code where 1000s of lines are very straightforward and linear. I’ve worked on code where 100 lines is crucial and very domain specific. It can be exceptionally clean and well-commented and it still takes days to unpack. The skills and effort required to review and understand those situations are quite different. One is like distance driving a boring highway in the Midwest:…

[deleted]

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

#112

Post by lelandfe »

moregrist wrote: post #99
ilikebits wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOC is useful here not because it's a metric for output but because it's a metric for _understandability_. Reviewing 200 lines is a very different workload than reviewing 2000.

It’s still a bad metric. I have worked with code where 1000s of lines are very straightforward and linear. I’ve worked on code where 100 lines is crucial and very domain specific. It can be exceptionally clean and well-commented and it still takes days to unpack. The skills and effort required to review and understand those situations are quite different. One is like distance driving a boring highway in the Midwest:…

There’s still a limit on how far one can drive in a day, no matter the road.

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

#113

Post by hungryhobbit »

devin wrote: post #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.

Humans are also incredibly varied and different.

Do you reject all stats that treat the number of people involved (eg. 2 million pepole protested X) as "embarrassing" ... because they lump incredibly varied people together and pretend they're equal?

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

#114

Post by [deleted] »

mcmcmc wrote: post #83
jazzypants wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming the 200 lines are logical and consistent. Many of my most frustrating LLM bugs are caused by things that look right and are even supported by lengthy comments explaining their (incorrect) reasoning.

Ok? No one is saying that all LOC are equal. Ceteris paribus, 2000 lines is 10x more time consuming to review than 200

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by throwaway613746 »

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…

[dead]

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

#116

Post by faizshah »

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"

It won't be an LLM that does it, the entire feature of an LLM is it produces generalizable reasonably "correct" text in response to a context.

The system that makes it have an opinion about good vs bad architecture or engineering sensibilities will be something on top of the transformer and probably something more deterministic than a prompt.

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

#117

Post by xantronix »

zarzavat wrote: post #24

Perhaps I've missed a few weeks worth of progress, but I don't think that AIs have become more trustworthy, the errors are just more subtle. If the code doesn't compile, that's easy to spot. If the code compiles but doesn't work, that's still somewhat easy to spot. If the code compiles and works, but it does the wrong thing in some edge case, or has a security vulnerability, or introduces tech debt or dubious archite…

I know there are good uses of LLMs out there. I do. But.

The current fever pitch mandates from above seem to want it applied liberally, and pushing back against that is so discouraging and often career-limiting as to wear the fabric of one's psyche threadbare. With all the obvious problems being pointed out to people, there are just as many workarounds; and these workarounds, as is often revealed shortly thereafter, have their own problems, which beget new solutions, ad infinitum.

At some point it genuinely seems like all this work is for the sake of the machine itself. I suppose that is true: The real goal has become obscured at so many firms today, that all that remains is the LLM. Are the people betting the farm and helping implement the visions of those who have done so guaranteed a soft exit to cushion them from the consequences, or is rationality really being discarded altogether?

Sure, sound engineering principles can help work around these problems, but what efficiency is truly gained, in terms of cognitive load, developer time, money, or finite resources? Or were those ever an earnest concern?

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

#118

Post by __alexs »

The current state of the technology is that you must read at least some of the code, but everyone keeps shipping tools that are focussed on churning out more and more stuff without giving you any affordances to really understand the output.

Claude Code in particular seems really uninterested in this aspect of the problem and I've stopped using entirely because of this.

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

#119

Post by embedding-shape »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71
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!

> I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster

Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower, less panicked when production was down and could reason their way (slowly) through pretty much anything thrown at them.

Opposite experience, I've sit next to developers who are trying their fastest to restore production and then making more mistakes to make it even worse, or developers who rush through the first implementation idea they had for a feature, missing to consider so many things and so on.

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

#120

Post by bitexploder »

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…

Vibe coded apps with barely no tests, invariants, etc. No wonder it turns into spaghetti. You can always refactor code, force agents to write small modular pieces and files. Good engineering is good engineering whether an agent or human wrote the code. Take time to force agents to refactor, explore choices. Humans must at least understand and drive architecture at this point still. Agents can help and do recon amazingly and provide suggestions.
Post reply on HN