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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

#261

Post by butlike »

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…

But are the pixels hot?

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

#262

Post by lbrito »

Daishiman wrote: post #215
lbrito wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between writing assembly code and Ruby code is much smaller than the difference between programming and vibe coding. Also, companies are pressuring employees towards adoption in novel ways. There was no such industry-wide pressure by employers in the 90s, 2000s or 2010s for engineers to use a specific tech.

> Also, companies are pressuring employees towards adoption in novel ways. There was no such industry-wide pressure by employers in the 90s, 2000s or 2010s for engineers to use a specific tech. Companies have been enforcing technology mandates since time immemorial. In the early 2000s there were definitely a lot of mandates to move away from commercial UNIX to Linux. Lots of companies began enforcing the switch to PH…

Yes, but the entire industry was not pushing any one single tool at the same time. If you disliked Django, you could go to Rails. If you disliked Rails, you had Phoenix. Etc.

Good luck disliking LLM babysitting these days

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

#263

Post by user34283 »

zarzavat wrote: post #155
christoff12 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has generally been the case, though. As mentioned in the post, "You want solutions that are proven to work before you take a risk on them" remains true and will be place where the edges are found.

It's about responsibility. If I get pwned because my AI agent wrote code that had a security vulnerability, none of my users are going to accept the excuse that I used AI and it's a brave new world. I will get the blame, not Anthropic or OpenAI or Google but me. The same goes for if my AI generated code leads to data loss, or downtime, or if uses too many resources, or it doesn't scale, or it gives out error messages…

On the other hand, I don’t need to review carefully every line of code in my thumbnail generator and associated UI.

My nonexistent backend isn’t going to be pwned if there is a bug in the thumbnail generation.

After the QA testing on my device, a quick scroll through of the code is enough.

Maybe prompt „are errors during thumbnail generation caught to prevent app crashes?“ if we‘re feeling extra cautious today.

And just like that it saved a day of work.

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

#264

Post by oompydoompy74 »

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.

The title for that is Director, VP, or CTO at any given large enterprise company.

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

#265

Post by atomicnumber3 »

user34283 wrote: post #257
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,…

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 wor…

"many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months"

I have heard this statement every single day for 2 years and yet we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".

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

#266

Post by AlotOfReading »

jcalx wrote: post #145
ativzzz wrote: post #10

Earlier 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"

There is definitely going to be some Wirth's law-like [0] effect about the asymmetry of software complexity outpacing LLMs' abilities to untangle said software. Claude 9.2 Optimus Prime might be able to wrangle 1M LoC, but somehow YC 2035 will have some Series A startup with 1B+ LoC in prod — we'll always have software companies teetering on the very edge of unmaintainability. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%…

It's the Peter principle for computers. Codebases expand to the limits of the organization's ability to manage them. If you make one person use ed to write code for a bare metal environment, you'll get a comparatively small, laser-focused codebase. If you task a hundred modern developers to solve the same problem, you'll get a Linux box device running a million lines of JavaScript.

Same thing happens in other fields. A rich country and a poor country might build equivalent roads, but they won't pay the same price for them.

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

#267

Post by chickensong »

orphea wrote: post #130
ativzzz wrote: post #10

Earlier 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"

Do you think new LLMs are going to write better and better code? When all they are going to have is the slop generated by previous, worse models?

Yes. The models may have started from indiscriminate scraping, but people are undoubtedly working on refining the training data. Combined with the overall model capabilities, I suspect code quality will continue to go up.

What you're suggesting is a negative flywheel where quality spirals down, but I'm hoping it becomes a positive loop and the quality floor goes up. We had plenty of slop before LLMs, and not all LLM output is slop. Time will tell, but I think LLMs will continue to improve their coding abilities and push overall quality higher.

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

#268

Post by JackSlateur »

jnwatson wrote: post #234
tuom1s wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you ready to bet your future on this ?

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

#269

Post by mlvljr »

DonHopkins wrote: post #109
estimator7292 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see your point, however: EA sports has been doing this for literally the entire lifetime of gaming as an industry

Electronic Sharts slogans and franchises: "Shit's in the Game!" "Chunder Everything" "Maddening NFL 26" "FIFiAsco 26" "UFC 26 (Un Finished Code)" "The Shits 4" "Battlefailed" "Need for Greed"

[dead]
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