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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

#131

Post by orphea »

zuzululu wrote: post #56
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 AI would be good enough to clean them all up....like I dont get these dooming scenarios they always assume that we are going to be stuck with LLMs and there wont be anything new coming.

  By then AI would be good enough to clean them all up...
[citation needed]

To make my comment more on-topic: why do you think this is going to be the case? What newer LLMs will be trained on?

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

#132

Post by skydhash »

murukesh_s wrote: post #75
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 w…

VS Code has two things that worked well for it. Web Tech and Money. Web tech makes it easy to write plugins (you already know the stack vs learning python for sublime). And I wonder how much traction it would get if not Microsoft paying devs to wrangle Electron in a usable shape.

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

#133

Post by DonHopkins »

hermitShell wrote: post #70
genghisjahn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally pro "llm assisted coding" or whatever you want to call it. But I do somethings think about the Butlerian Jihad from Dune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad

If you like sci-fi takes on software systems, check out Vernor Vinge "A Fire upon the deep" and sequels. I recall ship systems software is something like all the code humanity has ever written, plus centuries of LLM churn. One of the protagonists is a space faring software developer particularly good with legacy code. We are used to thinking about software like in the article, a program that runs deterministically in…

Pham Nuwen is a master of vibe patching legacy sedimentary software.

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

#134

Post by Izkata »

toraway wrote: post #89
cj wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again. LLMs aren’t the first thing to come along and change how people develop applications. You had the rise of frameworks like Django, Rails, etc. Also the rise of SPAs. And also the rise of JS as a frontend+backend language. In a 3-5 yeats we’ll have adapted to the new norm like we have in the past

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…

Some of us are already experiencing that. For example I handed off an initial version of something some months ago, and the AI-generated stuff they came up with was a huge buggy mess of spaghetti code neither of us understood. Months later we've detangled it, cutting it down to a third the size, making it far simpler to understand, and fixing several bugs in the process (one was even by accident, we'd made note of it, then later when we went to fix it, it was already fixed).

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

#135

Post by exographicskip »

_jss wrote: post #25

This is a timely observation and feels right to me. I needed to get a relatively simple batch download -> transform -> api endpoint stood up. I wrote a fairly detailed prompt but left a lot of implementation details out, including data sources. Opus 4.7 built it about 90% the same way I would, but had way more convenience methods and step-validations included. It's great, and really frees me up to think about harder…

This is my experience too. I'm primarily a python dev, but have been routinely using other backend languages (rust, go, etc) that I'm familiar with but not at the same level.

Just having ~13yrs experience heavily weighted in one language with some formal studying of others makes directing llms a lot simpler.

Learning syntax, primitives, package managers, testing, etc isn't that much of a lift compared to how I used to program.

Was helping a non-dev colleague who's using claude cowork/code to automate reporting the other day. They understand the business intelligence side well, but were struggling with basic diction to vibe code a pyautogui wrapper to pull up RDP and fill out a MS Access abstraction on a vendor DB.

Think we'll be fine for another 5-10 years as a profession

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

#136

Post by cortesoft »

xienze wrote: post #38
cortesoft wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not instant, but same day yes.

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

#137

Post by underdeserver »

When I was in grad school I graded homework for first year math classes, and the thing about math homework is that the perfect homework takes almost no time to grade.

It's the bad, semi-coherent submissions that eat up your time, because you do want to award some points and tell students where they went wrong. It's the Anna Karenina principle applied to math.

Code review is the same thing. If you're sure Claude wrote your endpoint right, why not review it anyway? It's going to take you two minutes, and you're not going to wonder whether this time it missed a nuance.

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

#138

Post by risyachka »

yakattak wrote: post #108
jf22 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, most software is already a hot mess. Second, LLM code can be less of a hot mess than human written code if you put in the time to train/prompt/verify/review. Generating perfect well patterned SOLID and unit tested code with no warnings or anti-patterns has never been easier.

The only people who are going to put in the time, are people who care enough to. The problem is you have people who didn’t care before who were equipped with a garden hose. Now that they have a fully pressurized fire hose they can make more of a mess faster.

This is so on point that I want to cry.

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

#140

Post by exographicskip »

lubujackson wrote: post #122

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 th…

Good description of my thoughts on vibe coding / agentic engineering.

Spend a lot more time on architecting and testing than hand rolling most repos now.

Hats off to people who enjoy the minutia of programming everything by hand, but turns out I enjoy the other aspects of software development more.

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