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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

#161

Post by jkaptur »

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.

However, the best engineers I know are usually among the quickest to open an editor or debugger and use it fluently to try something out. It's precisely that speed that enables a process like "let's try X, hmm, how about Y, no... ok, Z is nice; ok team, here are the tradeoffs...". Then they remember their experience with X, Y, and Z, and use it to shape their thinking going forward.

Meanwhile, other engineers have gotten X to finally mostly work and are invested in shipping it because they just want to be done. In my experience, this is how a lot of coding agents seem to act.

It's not obvious to me how to apply the expert loop to agentic coding. Of course you can ask your agent to try several different things and pick the best, or ask it to recommend architectural improvements that would make a given change easier...

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

#162

Post by jstummbillig »

jf22 wrote: post #12
jstummbillig wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how most organizations work, AI or not.

What do you mean?

Organizations usually are not looking for employees who change things that work fine, just because it disagrees with the "vision" of one employee.

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

#163

Post by AnimalMuppet »

deadbabe wrote: post #84
adtac wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOC is the worst metric for engineering output, except for all the others - Churchill

The amount of times an engineer says what the fuck while reading code still seems like a reliable metric for code quality assessment.

Somewhat reliable, yes. Not objective, though, and hard to reproduce.

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

#164

Post by Daishiman »

xantronix wrote: post #117
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,…

There's two sides to the AI mandates.

The degenerate side is clueless upper management and fad-driven engineering. We have talked extensively about this.

There is a more rational side to it that I've seen in my org: some engineers absolutely refuse to use AI and as a consequence they are now, clearly and objectively, much less productive than other engineers. The thing is, you still need to learn how to use the tool, so a nontrivial percentage of obstinate engineers need to be driven to use this in the same way that some developers have refused to use Docker or k8s or whatever.

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

#166

Post by pllbnk »

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…

I think it’s a mistake to think that we will be blindly going in this direction for many years and then suddenly collectively wake up and realize what have we done. It’s a great filter and a great opportunity.

If LLMs stop improving at the pace of the last few years (I believe they already are slowing down) then they will still manage to crank out billions lines of code which they themselves won’t be able to grep and reason through, leading to drop in quality and lost revenue for the companies that choose to go all-in with LLMs.

But let’s be realistic - modern LLMs are still a great and useful tool when used properly so they will stay. Our goal will be to keep them on track and reduce the negative impact of hallucinations.

As a result software industry will move away from large complex interconnected systems that have millions of features but only a few of them actively used, to small high quality targeted tools. Because their work will be easier to verify and to control the side effects.

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

#167

Post by zuzululu »

orphea wrote: post #131
zuzululu wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

well you are assuming that there's not going to be any new progress and that we are going to be stuck with whatever LLM version we have currently

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

#169

Post by ButyTh0 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #128
ButyTh0 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of human agency must prop up the vanity of you. Of all people.

Got it.

...ok fine; lack of political action to put us all on the hook for your healthcare is your choice to take a gamble on a paycheck. It's a choice to say your own existence is not owed the assurance of healthcare.

So I will honor your choice and not care you exist.

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

#170

Post by leptons »

pllbnk wrote: post #166
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…

I think it’s a mistake to think that we will be blindly going in this direction for many years and then suddenly collectively wake up and realize what have we done. It’s a great filter and a great opportunity. If LLMs stop improving at the pace of the last few years (I believe they already are slowing down) then they will still manage to crank out billions lines of code which they themselves won’t be able to grep and…

I wish I got to hallucinate at work, and just get a pat on the head for constantly doing the wrong thing.
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