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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

#231

Post by bossyTeacher »

turtlebits wrote: post #228

The scary part is that codebases are getting layers of AI complexity, that it's going to cost $$$ to have the latest model decipher and make changes as no human can understand the code anymore. Pretty soon there is no code reuse and we're burning money reinventing the wheel over and over.

> The scary part is that codebases are getting layers of AI complexity, that it's going to cost $$$ to have the latest model decipher

Isn't this a bit like old Java or IDE-heavy languages like old Java/C#? If you tried to make Android apps back in the early days, you HAD to use an IDE, writing the ridicolous amount of boilerplate you had to write to display a "Hello Word" alert after clicking a button was soul destroying.

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

#232

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

nathan_compton wrote: post #211
ryandrake wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower Unfortunately, a lot of workplaces are ignoring this, believing their engineers are assembly line workers, and the ones who complete 10 widgets per minute are simply better than the ones who complete 5 widgets per minute.

It isn't just that they believe this - they want a business model where this is how it works. For a big company a star coder is a liability - they have strong labor power, they can leave and they are hard to replace, etc. Companies want workflows that work with mediocre programmers because they are more like interchangeable parts. This is the real secret to why AI programming will work in a lot of places. If you look…

Glad I find myself employed under a division called Research and Development. Poaching and retaining highly compensated individuals is the entire purpose.

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

#233

Post by stronglikedan »

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…

> is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs.

That's what the Tech-Priests are for.

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

#234

Post by jnwatson »

tuom1s wrote: post #86
drfloyd51 wrote: post #49

It is pure arrogance to expect that machines will never be able to code as good as a skilled human. And AI generated code should be different than human code. AI has infinite memory for details. AI doesn’t need organizational patterns like classes. Potentially AI can write code that is more performant than any human. Will it look like garbage? Sure. Will the code be more suited to the task? Yes.

What will happen when AI companies increase the price of tokens? The code produced will only be understandable by AI. You could use locally hosted LLMs, but it won't be as performant as AI run by big guys. And there is nothing stopping greedy companies implementing some ridiculous pattern that only their model can reasonably work with. So what you'll do in situation when you can't understand "your" codebase and you h…

What happens when the price of tokens goes to 0?

The open weight models are nipping on the heels of frontier models. The frontier labs have to make forward progress and keep tokens cheap in order to maintain marketshare.

Eventually, we'll have a Mythos-level model running on integrated hardware on every PC.

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

#235

Post by ilaksh »

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…

30 years down the line a human will wake up in his climate controlled bed in an idyllic large scale people-zoo, think about what information he wants, and immediately his 900TB ferroelectric compute-in-memory exobrain will read his thoughts via his brain-computer-interface, and render a custom 3d visualization of that information floating in front of him. There will be no separate code stage, just neural rendering of data to pixels.

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

#236

Post by jf22 »

jplusequalt wrote: post #213
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.

>First, most software is already a hot mess. That the industry was already routinely dealing with fires of it's own creation is not a valid reason to start cooking with gasoline.

But we aren't cooking with gas. We are cooking with a more controlled burner than ever that can download a clean code claude skill and be committing better code than you or I could write.

What would normally be considered overengineered gold plating is "free" now.

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

#237

Post by kingleopold »

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…

another aspect is amount of code LLMs can handle went from few lines to small codebase in few years, so future is just possible for a lot bigger codebases?

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

#238

Post by lelanthran »

jmalicki wrote: post #225
rgbrenner wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300k-400k isn’t the current limit if you create modules and/or organize the code reasonably.. for the same reason we do this for humans: it allows us to interact with a component without loading the internals into out context. you can also execute larger tasks than this using subagents to divide the work so each segment doesn’t exceed the usable context window. i regular execute tasks that require hundreds of subagen…

That makes it not a context window. How to organize code like you said, and how agents interact with it, to keep the actual context window small is the fundamental challenge.

I keep getting surprised that people who are all-in on this (" i regular execute tasks that require hundreds of subagents ") don't have any idea of what is happening even a single layer below their interface to the LLM ("in practice the context window is effectively unlimited or at least exceptionally high — 100m+ tokens.")

I looked at that response by GP (rgbrenner) and refrained from replying because if someone is both running hundreds of agents at a time AND oblivious to what "context window" means, there is no possible sane discourse that would result from any engagement.

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

#239

Post by Insanity »

mohsen1 wrote: post #154
Insanity wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also experimenting with it more and more. Now I'm trying to create a 2D side-scrolling shooter with it, running in the browser. When it was relatively small, it did a good job. As the codebase and docs/ files that I'm using get larger it starts hallucinating, especially when the context gets at about 50% usage (Codex w/ gpt5.5). As in, it'll literally forget to update parts of the code. e.g, I change velocity of…

For me, unless there is a concrete way of proving work is correct you can't rely on AI coding. tsz has super strict tests around correctness, performance and architectural boundaries

If I understood you correctly, I think I'm less extreme than that. Most code written by humans is also not provably correct. But I'm assuming you mean provably correct like Lean: https://lean-lang.org/, and not just "passes tests".

If you mean 'passes tests', that can be tackled by AI. Although AI writing its own tests and then implementing its own code is definitely not a foolproof strategy.

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

#240

Post by turtlebits »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #231
turtlebits wrote: post #228

The scary part is that codebases are getting layers of AI complexity, that it's going to cost $$$ to have the latest model decipher and make changes as no human can understand the code anymore. Pretty soon there is no code reuse and we're burning money reinventing the wheel over and over.

> The scary part is that codebases are getting layers of AI complexity, that it's going to cost $$$ to have the latest model decipher Isn't this a bit like old Java or IDE-heavy languages like old Java/C#? If you tried to make Android apps back in the early days, you HAD to use an IDE, writing the ridicolous amount of boilerplate you had to write to display a "Hello Word" alert after clicking a button was soul destro…

At least a human can get involved. Complex codebases written by humans can be understood.

If the barrier is too high, code is refactored.

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