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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

#191

Post by lelanthran »

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…

> If LLMs stop improving at the pace of the last few years (I believe they already are slowing down)

Depending on how you measure "improvement" they already have or they never will :-/

Measuring capability of the model as a ratio of context length, you reach the limits at around 300k-400k tokens of context; after that you have diminishing returns. We passed this point.

Measuring capability purely by output, smarter harnesses in the future may unlock even more improvements in outputs; basically a twist on the "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" (https://wiki.c2.com/?SufficientlySmartCompiler=)

That's the two extremes but there's more on the spectrum in between.

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

#192

Post by yakattak »

senordevnyc wrote: post #173
yakattak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Defeat in what aspect?

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

#193

Post by Daishiman »

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.

Hard disagree. LLMs are fantastic for fixing bad architecture that's been around for a decade because nobody was willing to touch it. I can have it write tons and tons of sanity checks and then have it rewrite functionality piece by piece with far more verification than what I'd get from most engineers.

It's not immediate, it still takes weeks if you want to actually do QA and roll out to prod, but it's definitely better than the pre-LLM alternatives.

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

#194

Post by ok123456 »

One-shot "vibe coding" is generally a mistake.

But using an agentic LLM to complete boilerplate is attractive simply because we've created a mountain of accidental and intentional complexity in building software. It's more of a regression to the mean of going back to the cognitive load we had when we simply built desktop applications.

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

#195

Post by lelanthran »

wan23 wrote: post #188
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…

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 tr…

I think the problem with that sort of thought is that the burgeoning sizes of output for even trivial software makes it almost a certainty that:

a) The stuff output by the existing LLMs is too unwieldy even for them to handle , even if the product itself is a glorified chatbot.

b) If all software is throwaway, then the value of all software drops to, effectively, the price of an AI subscription. We'll all be drowning in a market of lemons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons), whilst also being producers in said market.

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

#196

Post by deadbabe »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #52

Have you noticed that the coding agents get really close to the solution on the first one shot and then require tons of work to get that last 10% or 5%? If we shift the paradigm of how we approach a coding problem, the coding agents can close that gap. Ten years ago every 10 or 15 minutes I would stop coding and start refactoring, testing, and analyzing making sure everything is perfect before proceeding because a bu…

That will not work as cleanly as you described once a lot of code has been committed to the code base. You cannot just blow away an entire working code base and start over just because an LLM is struggling to make a feature work with existing architecture.

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

#197

Post by deadbabe »

GistNoesis wrote: post #157

The real paradigm shift is not here yet, but not very far away. I'm talking about the single unified codebase. Agents building a unique codebase for all your software needs. Because most of the complexity in software comes from interfacing with external components, when you don't need to adapt to this you can write simpler and better code. Rather than relying on an external library, you just write your own and have f…

Every happy OS will be the same. Every broken OS will be broken in its own way. What a nightmare.

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

#198

Post by dyauspitr »

ok123456 wrote: post #194

One-shot "vibe coding" is generally a mistake. But using an agentic LLM to complete boilerplate is attractive simply because we've created a mountain of accidental and intentional complexity in building software. It's more of a regression to the mean of going back to the cognitive load we had when we simply built desktop applications.

Tell it to make a plan. Ask it to do 3-5 steps at a time. “One shotting” works very well.

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

#199

Post by yakattak »

Daishiman wrote: post #193
yakattak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hard disagree. LLMs are fantastic for fixing bad architecture that's been around for a decade because nobody was willing to touch it. I can have it write tons and tons of sanity checks and then have it rewrite functionality piece by piece with far more verification than what I'd get from most engineers. It's not immediate , it still takes weeks if you want to actually do QA and roll out to prod, but it's definitely b…

Yeah but you care which is my exact point.

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

#200

Post by dyauspitr »

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.

Honestly it’s more like 200 to a 100,000 of pretty decent quality code at this point.
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