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

#241

Post by Daishiman » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

yakattak wrote: post #199

Daishiman wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is this different from every single technological iteration?

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

#242

Post by pllbnk » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

leptons wrote: post #170

pllbnk wrote: post #166

Earlier 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.

Maybe I am unlucky but I had worked with too many developers who couldn't make a good decision if their life depended on it. LLMs at least know how to convince you of their decisions with strong arguments.

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

#243

Post by ofjcihen » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:56 PM UTC

stronglikedan wrote: post #233

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.

No post body was provided.

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

#244

Post by p_stuart82 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:58 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #217

tyyyy3 wrote: post #59

Correct me if I’m wrong Simon, but weren’t you highly optimistic about llm’s and agentic-use of them? I believe this is a common fault of not being able to zoom out and look at what trade offs are being made. There’s always trade-offs, the question is whether you can define them and then do the analysis to determine whether the result leaves you in a net benefit state.

I still am. I think setting up LLMs to call tools in a loop is a fascinating way to build interesting software that could not have existed before. Coding agents are also upending how software development works, in a way that we are still very much figuring out. I don't think anyone has a confident answer for how best to apply them yet, especially on larger production-ready projects.

I think you kind of answered this in the post though. "I want somebody to have used the thing" is dogfooding. and it's probably the only quality signal left that can't be generated in 30 minutes.

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

#245

Post by MagicMoonlight » Wed, May 06, 2026, 6:59 PM UTC

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 seen Windows? We already have thirty years of slop.

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

#246

Post by keeda » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

I think all coding will become vibe coding, but it will be no less an engineering discipline.

Note: I still review pretty much every line of code that I own, regardless of who generates it, and I see the problems with agents very clearly... but I can also see the trends.

My take: Instead of crafting code, engineering will shift to crafting bespoke, comprehensive validation mechanisms for the results of the agents' work such that it is technically (maybe even mathematically) provable as far as possible, and any non-provable validations can be reviewed quickly by a human. I would also bet the review mechanisms would be primarily visually, because that is the highest bandwidth input available to us.

By comprehensive validations I don't mean just tests, but multiple overlapping, interlocking levels of tests and metrics. Like, I don't just have an E2E test for the UI, I have an overlapping test for expected changes in the backend DB. And in some cases I generate so many test cases that I don't check for individual rows, I look at the distribution of data before and after the test. I have very few unit tests, but I do have performance tests! I color-code some validation results so that if something breaks I instantly know what it may be.

All of this is overkill to do manually but is a breeze with agents, and over time really enables moving fast without breaking things. I also notice I have to add very few new validations for new code changes these days, so once the upfront cost is paid, the dividends roll in for a long time.

Now, I had to think deeply about the most effective set of technical constraints that give me the most confidence while accounting for the foibles of the LLMs. And all of this is specific to my projects, not much can be generalized other than high-level principles like "multiple interlocking tests." Each project will need its own custom validation (note: not just "test") suites which are very specific to its architecture and technical details.

So this is still engineering, but it will be vibe coding in the sense that we almost never look at the code, we just look at the results.

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

#247

Post by callc » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC

Daishiman wrote: post #164

xantronix wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Ah yes, we must force these obstinate engineers to the right path! Only after getting everyone to see the light will they understand and thank us for boundless productivity!! /s

Perhaps these “obstinate” engineers have good reason in their decision. And it should be their decision!

To be so confident in what is “the right way (TM)” and try to force it onto others is... revealing.

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

#248

Post by huflungdung » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:03 PM UTC

keeda wrote: post #246

I think all coding will become vibe coding, but it will be no less an engineering discipline. Note: I still review pretty much every line of code that I own, regardless of who generates it, and I see the problems with agents very clearly... but I can also see the trends. My take: Instead of crafting code, engineering will shift to crafting bespoke, comprehensive validation mechanisms for the results of the agents' wo…

[dead]

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

#249

Post by giraffe_lady » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:06 PM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #235

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…

Who empties the bedpan?

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

#250

Post by dev360 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 7:07 PM UTC

> It’s not just the downstream stuff, it’s the upstream stuff as well. I saw a great talk by Jenny Wen, who’s the design leader at Anthropic, where she said we have all of these design processes that are based around the idea that you need to get the design right—because if you hand it off to the engineers and they spend three months building the wrong thing, that’s catastrophic.

This is spot on. I think the tooling is evolving so much particularly on the design side that its not worth the "translation cost" to stay (or even be) on the Figma side anymore.