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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

#251

Post by dev360 »

kushalpatil07 wrote: post #149

Every time I do deep work, and think of solutions to a complex problem. I always have the opportunity to ask claude to implement a sub-par AI slop solution. Do this enough times, and I will have forgotten how to think.

Or, you just explain the solution and save some typing and get the same thing. I find it refreshing to be able to just talk to Claude and have it generate the same thing I would have built.. It gives me more time to articulate and solve complex problems, and less time with the mundane writing, test loops etc.

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

#252

Post by efnx »

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…

Better not think a forbidden thought. Oh shoot! You just did! :)

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

#253

Post by kw3b »

Strong agree. Most orgs will stay tangled in the mess they hand-coded over the years, a few greenfield teams will pull ahead, but until some LLM-fuelled startup displaces a strong incumbent I'm skeptical that we're on the cusp of anything other than a K-shaped transition. I see already low quality software and orgs getting flushed to make room for some new ideas now that the barrier to entry is slightly lower (but far from free). I just wish the transition was done with more humanity.

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

#254

Post by frizlab »

efnx wrote: post #252
ilaksh wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Better not think a forbidden thought. Oh shoot! You just did! :)

Well thanks, I lost the game now :|

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

#255

Post by pkulak »

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 can't get used to vibe-coded projects on Github. One that I was using for a little while is about a year old, with 40,000 commits and 15,000 PRs. And it has "lite" in its name; it's supposed to be the simple alternative. There were so many bugs. I fixed one, submitted a PR, but it was off the first page in hours. It will never be merged. I moved to a different project with a bit less... velocity, and it has been way smoother.

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

#256

Post by _doctor_love »

Repeat after me: most software spends the majority of its lifetime in the maintenance phase.

Repeat after me: it follows that most of the money the software makes occurs during the maintenance phase.

Repeat after me: our industry still does not understand this after almost 100 years of being in existence.

Alan Kay was 100% right when he said that the computer revolution hasn't occurred yet. For all of our current advancements all tools are more or less in the Stone Age.

My great hope is that AI will actually accelerate us to a point where the existing paradigm fully breaks beyond healing and we can finally do something new, different, and better.

So for now - squeee! - put a jetpack on your SDLC with AI and go to town!!! Move fast and break things (like, for real).

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

#257

Post by user34283 »

xantronix wrote: post #117
zarzavat wrote: post #24

Perhaps I've missed a few weeks worth of progress, but I don't think that AIs have become more trustworthy, the errors are just more subtle. If the code doesn't compile, that's easy to spot. If the code compiles but doesn't work, that's still somewhat easy to spot. If the code compiles and works, but it does the wrong thing in some edge case, or has a security vulnerability, or introduces tech debt or dubious archite…

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,…

In my opinion you are just wrong.

It’s an absolute game changer, and it can now multiply your productivity fivefold if it’s a solo greenfield project.

Maybe half a year ago it was as you said. You had to wait for the agent to finish, you had to review carefully, and often the result was not that great. You did not save a lot of time.

Now I can spin up 3+ parallel conversations in Codex, each in a git worktree. My work is mainly QA testing the features, refining the behavior, and sometimes making architectural decisions.

The results are now undeniable. In the past I could not have developed a product of that scope in my free time.

That is what is possible today. I suspect many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months. Like parallel agents, resolving merge conflicts, separating out functionality from a large branch into proper PRs.

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

#258

Post by dev360 »

simonw wrote: post #220
0gs wrote: post #181

huh. i honestly never thought they were all that different. didn't the same guy coin them both to refer to the same thing?

Not at all. Andrej Karpathy coined vibe coding as: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 > where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists [...] It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mo…

> as part of a responsible development process, taking full advantage of their existing expertise and with a goal to produce good, reliable software

Its shifted so much for me. I used to think that I had a solemn duty to read every line and understand it, or to write all the test cases. Then I started noticing that tools like CodeRabbit, or Cursor would find things in my code that I would rarely find myself.

I think right now, its shifted my perception of my role to one where I am responsible for "tilting" the agentic coding loop; ultimately the goal is a matter of ensuring the agent learns from its mistakes, self-organize and embrace a spirit of Kaizen.

Btw thank you for your work on Django, last 20 years with it were life changing (I did .NET before).

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

#259

Post by genghisjahn »

hermitShell wrote: post #70
genghisjahn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally pro "llm assisted coding" or whatever you want to call it. But I do somethings think about the Butlerian Jihad from Dune. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dune:_The_Butlerian_Jihad

If you like sci-fi takes on software systems, check out Vernor Vinge "A Fire upon the deep" and sequels. I recall ship systems software is something like all the code humanity has ever written, plus centuries of LLM churn. One of the protagonists is a space faring software developer particularly good with legacy code. We are used to thinking about software like in the article, a program that runs deterministically in…

Ordered Fire Upon the Deep. Looks interesting.

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

#260

Post by butlike »

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…

People, as a rule, don't really "go backwards." We didn't really walk back on the industrial revolution, and we're probably not going to walk back from this day-and-age's activities. It's only unsettling until the changes are accepted. The old timers can vie for a time before "all this" when they were children and all their needs were given to them by their now-deceased parents, and the cycle can continue on, yet again.
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