Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by 8note » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #126

faizshah wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 me…

or go with this, and use the agent to prototype ideas, and write it yourself once you know what you want

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

#172

Post by jimbokun » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #123

mcmcmc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why would the lines in the 2000 case be easier to review per line?

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

#173

Post by senordevnyc » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

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.

Then they should be easy to defeat. Why are you complaining?

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

#174

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:51 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #123

mcmcmc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#175

Post by [deleted] » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #148

michelb wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 30 years down the line I still have to look at code, maintain code, or even worry in the slightest about code, something went deeply wrong.

Code will never go away. Code was there before computer hardware and it will always be there. Code is (almost?) all of computation theory so unless we throw computers away, we shall always use code.

[deleted]

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

#176

Post by skydhash » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:52 PM UTC

jkaptur wrote: post #161

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

The Pragmatic Programmer book has whole chapters about this. Ultimately, you either solve the problem analogously (whiteboard, deep thinking on a sofa). Or you got fast as trying out stuff AND keeping the good bits.

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

#177

Post by 000000000001 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

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…

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

The new standard, Web Apps. Why update 3 seperate binaries for Win/Lin/Mac when you can do 1 for a web framework and call it a day?

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

#178

Post by jimbokun » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

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:…

The number of bugs tends to be linear to lines of code written meaning fewer lines of code for the same functionality will have fewer bugs.

So I’m pretty skeptical that reviewing 2000 lines of code won’t take any more time than reviewing 200 lines of code.

Furthermore how do you know the AI generated lines are the open highway lines of code and not the mountain road ones? There might be hallucinations that pattern match as perfectly reasonable with a hard to spot flaw.

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

#179

Post by peterbell_nyc » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

For me the distinction is the quality and rigor of your pipeline.

Vibe coding: one shot or few shot, smoke test the output, use it until it breaks (or doesn't). Ideal for lightweight PoC and low stakes individual, family or small team apps.

Agentic engineering: - You care about a larger subset of concerns such as functional correctness, performance, infrastructure, resilience/availability, scalability and maintainability. - You have a multi-step pipeline for managing the flow of work - Stages might be project intake, project selection, project specification, epic decomposition, d=story decomposition, coding, documentation and deployment. - Each stage will have some combination of deterministic quality gates (tests must pass, performance must hit a benchmark) and adversarial reviews (business value of proposed project, comprehensiveness of spec, elegance of code, rigor and simplicity of ubiquitous language, etc)

And it's a slider. Sometimes I throw a ticket into my system because I don't want to have to do an interview and burn tokens on three rounds of adversarial reviews, estimating potential value and then detailed specification and adversarial reviews just to ship a feature.

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

#180

Post by mcmcmc » Wed, May 06, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #123

mcmcmc wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Holy shit, read the words I wrote. Ceteris Paribus. Assume the 200 lines and 2000 lines have a similar distribution of complexity.