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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

#121

Post by mohsen1 »

copypaper wrote: post #102
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…

>25k commits in 4 months or about 1 commit every 7 minutes How do you manage/orchestrate this? I'm genuinely curious.

Multiple computers and each multiple Claude Code or Codex sessions. It had lots of ups and downs. Now I have a good enough test harness that makes it easier to iterate faster

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

#122

Post by lubujackson »

I think this is what people mean when they say LLMs are a higher level abstraction. We still need to consider edge cases and have tests. We still to sweat the architecture and understand how the pieces fit together and have a mental map of the codebase. But within each bottom node of that architecture we don't sweat the details. Anything obvious gets caught right away. Most subtle/interaction-based issues occur at the architecture level. Anything that bypasses those filters is a weird bug that is no worse or different from a normal bug fixes - an edge case that was hit in a real world scenario that gets flagged by a user or a logged as an error.

There are certain codebases and pieces of code we definitely want every line to be reasoned and understood. But like his API endpoint example, no reason to fuss with the boilerplate.

This has definitely been my shift over the past few months, and the advantage is I can spend much more time and energy on getting the code architecture just right, which automatically prevents most of the subtle bugs that has people wringing their hands. The new bar is architecting code to be defined as well as an API endpoint->service structure so you can rely on LLMs to paint by numbers for new features/logic.

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

#123

Post by embedding-shape »

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

> 2000 lines is 10x more time consuming to review than 200

Very far from the truth in practice, every line of code isn't as difficult/easy to review as the other.

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

#124

Post by mrbnprck »

ilikebits wrote: post #57
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.

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.

Its still posssible to run any LLM in a loop and optimize for LoC while preserving the wanted outcome.

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

#125

Post by jazzypants »

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

The point is that LOC is never a good metric for any aspect of determining the quality of code or the coder because it ignores the nuance of reality. It's impossible to generalize because the code can be either deceptively dense or unnecessarily bloated. The only thing that actually matters is whether the business objective is achieved without any unintended side effects.

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

#126

Post by embedding-shape »

faizshah wrote: post #101
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.

I experimented with vibe coding (not looking at the code myself) and it produced around 10k LOC even after refactors etc. I rewrote the same program using my own brain and just using ChatGPT as google and autocomplete (my normal workflow), I produced the same thing in 1500 LOC. The effort difference was not that significant either tbh although my hand coded approach probably benefited from designing the vibe coded on…

Sounds like a great oppurtunity to understand your own development process, and codify it in such detail that the agent can replicate how you work and end up with less code but doing the same.

My experience was the same as you when I started using agents for development about a year ago. Every time I noticed it did something less-than-optimal or just "not up to my standards", I'd hash out exactly what those things meant for me, added it to my reusable AGENTS.md and the code the agent outputs today is fairly close to what I "naturally" write.

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

#127

Post by toraway »

cj wrote: post #100
toraway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it could be like asbestos and the immediate benefits are just too appealing to listen to arguments of skeptical naysayers about some vaguely defined problems that are decades away, if they even happen. I use AI tools daily (because they feel like they're helping me ) but it's not exactly hard to imagine scenarios where an explosion of slop piling up plus harm to learning by outsourcing all thinking results in sys…

> Or, it could be like asbestos If it is, the fall out will be way worse than if AI ends up living up to (reasonable) expectations. If it doesn’t, we are going to see over a trillion dollars of capital leave the tech sector, which I think will have worse impacts on the livelihood of tech workers than if AI ends up panning out. This is something the naysayers need to grapple with. We’ve crossed a line where this tech…

The asbestos hypothetical is a bit different than the "bubble popping" economic crisis scenario though. In this world, AI would just continue being adopted and shoved into every nook and cranny into which it can be made to fit, with valuations only getting bigger and bigger.

The damage would come much later, well beyond the point where it could be simply pulled out and replaced without spending massive amounts of money and would also basically necessitate training an entire new generation of engineers.

Then the AI giants would start appearing vulnerable like cigarette companies in the 90s while an AI Superfund and interstate class action are being planned but Sam Altman would already be a centitrillionaire at that point so it would be someone else's problem.

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

#128

Post by embedding-shape »

ButyTh0 wrote: post #110
etothet wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. And, LOC has historically been one of the things we've collectively fought against management for how to evalute a "productive" developer!

Why? We should have gone the other way; generated a lot of code and demanded pay raises; look at the LOC I cranked out! Company is now in my debt! If they weren't going to care enough as managers to learn and line go up is all that matters to them, make all lines go up = winning You all think there's more to this than performative barter for coin to spend on food/shelter.

Because not everyone is just out after earning the most money, some people also want to enjoy the workplace where they work. Personally, what the quality of the codebase and infrastructure is in matters a lot for how much you enjoy working in it, and I'd much rather work in a codebase I enjoy and earn half, than a codebase made by just jerking out as many LOC as possible and earn double.

Although this requires you to take pride in your profession and what you do.

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

#129

Post by slopinthebag »

I agree, I'm actually generating just over of 20,000 lines of code each day at my company. Part of that was the mandate and leaderboards around token usage, but also they started using pull requests as an explicit metric. What I do is usually pull around 5 or so tickets at once, spin up 5 different agents on their own branch, have them work until completion, and then spin up two more agents to handle the merge request.

I'm not checking the code since the code doesn't really matter anymore anyways - I just have the agent write passing tests for the changes or additions I make, and so even if something breaks I can just point to the tests.

Some days, the tickets are completed much faster than I expect and I don't hit my daily token expenditure goal, so I have my own custom harness that actually hooks up an agent to TikTok, basically it splits up the reel into 1 second increments and then feeds those frames to the LLM for it's own consumption. I can easily burn 10m tokens a day on this, and Claude seems to enjoy it.

Personally I want to thank you Simon for putting me onto this "vibe engineering" concept, I really didn't expect an archaeology major like myself to become a real engineer but thanks to AI now I can be! Truly gatekeeping in tech is now dead.

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

#130

Post by orphea »

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"

Do you think new LLMs are going to write better and better code? When all they are going to have is the slop generated by previous, worse models?
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