huh. i honestly never thought they were all that different. didn't the same guy coin them both to refer to the same thing?
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
181–190 of 958 posts
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#182Earlier 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…
Or: depth-first search of the solution space vs breadth-first (or balanced) search of the solution space.
> 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
The ideal solution increasingly seems to be encoding everything that differentiates a good engineer from a bad engineer into your prompt.
But at that point the LLM isn’t really the model as much as the medium. And I have some doubts that LLMs are the ideal medium for encoding expertise.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#183Earlier 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.
They're not suggesting that code will go away, but rather that it will be abstracted beneath an LLM interface, so that writing code in the future will be like writing assembly today: some people do it for fun or niche reasons, but otherwise it's not necessary, and most developers can't do it.
Whether that happens or not is a different question, but I believe that's what they're suggesting.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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
Do you not run out of things to code?
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The only thing that actually matters is whether the business objective is achieved without any unintended side effects. Objectives change; timeliness matters. The speed at which you deliver value is incredibly important, which is why it matters to measure your process. Deceptively dense is what I’d call software engineers who can’t accept that the process is actually generalizable to a degree and that lines of code…
> Objectives change; timeliness matters. The speed at which you deliver value is incredibly important, which is why it matters to measure your process. This assumes that shorter code is faster to write. To quote Blaise Pascal, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time." > Can you deliver value without lines of code? No, but you can also depreciate value when you stuff a codebase full of bloa…
You seem determined to misinterpret. I’m not talking about LOC as a measure of productivity. The ratio of LOC needing review to the capacity of reviewers (using how many LOC can be read/reviewed over the sampling period) is what’s being discussed. Agentic AI/vibe coding has caused that ratio to increase and shows a bottleneck in the SDLC. It’s a proxy metric, get over yourself.
“All models are wrong, some are useful”. What’s not useful is constantly bitching about how there’s no way to measure your work outside of the binary “is it done” every time process efficiency is brought up.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
We can do this today too (but definitely hopefully future LLMs make better architectural decisions). With Claude, I've been working on an application for the last 2 months. I didn't have a great vision of what I wanted when I started but I didn't want that to slow me down. The architecture is terrible - Claude separated some functionality into different classes but did a bad job at it and created a big ball of mud. N…
Just have claude (or gpt maybe) do an architecture review and request a multi-phase refactoring plan. This is probably better to do incrementally as you notice the balls of mud forming but it might not be too late. Either way, if it does something you don't like, `git checkout` and start over
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean you can do that, but the job probably doesn't pay too much. Might enrich your spirituality though.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#188People 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…
Have you ever encountered the very common real life situation where there's some software that works, and you have a binary for it but you either don't have the source code or it doesn't compile for whatever reason? This is the pre-LLM world. Now, do you think LLMs make this situation better or worse? You may not know what's wrong with your software or how to fix it, but unlike in the past you can throw compute at trying to figure it out, or replicating a subset of it, or even replicating all of it depending on what it is. I think LLMs are making this situation better not worse.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In a world where everything is vibes now that doesn’t matter much.