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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

#271

Post by nothinkjustai »

pllbnk wrote: post #242
leptons wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mmm, I feel it’s more common for them to just blindly agree with whatever you say.

Assistant: “I propose A”

User: “Actually B is better”

Assistant: “you’re absolutely right”

User: “actually let’s go with C”

Assistant: “Good choice, reasons”

User: “wait A is better”

Assistant: “Great decision!”

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

#272

Post by addedGone »

dyauspitr wrote: post #198
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.

why in May 2026, it seems that people haven't discovered loops? people are ignorant, run 20 times the same task in a loop to verify and it's pristine.

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

#273

Post by sunrunner »

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…

> custom 3d visualization of that information floating in front of him.

Eh, what a waste. Can't we just stimulate the optic nerve? Or better yet, whatever region of the brain is responsible for me being able to 'see' anything? And perhaps we can finally get smell-o-vision too.

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

#274

Post by sunrunner »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #249
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…

Who empties the bedpan?

It's a tube and it's directly connected, for efficiency. Feel free to fill in the rest of the story.

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

#275

Post by empthought »

callc wrote: post #247
Daishiman wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Engineers that didn't move past src.v35.final.zip version control don't really have jobs today, either.

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

#276

Post by passivepinetree »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #265
user34283 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Well, the GP mentioned

> if it’s a solo greenfield project

which is a pretty large caveat. Anecdotally, I've found my side projects (which are solo greenfield projects, and don't need to be supported to the same standards as enterprise software) have gained the boost the GP was talking about.

At work, it's different, since design, review, and maintenance is much more onerous.

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

#277

Post by lelanthran »

cj wrote: post #100
toraway wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, it could be like asbestos and the immediate benefits are just too appealing to listen to arguments of skeptical naysayers about some vaguely defined problems that are decades away, if they even happen. I use AI tools daily (because they feel like they're helping me ) but it's not exactly hard to imagine scenarios where an explosion of slop piling up plus harm to learning by outsourcing all thinking results in sys…

> Or, it could be like asbestos If it is, the fall out will be way worse than if AI ends up living up to (reasonable) expectations. If it doesn’t, we are going to see over a trillion dollars of capital leave the tech sector, which I think will have worse impacts on the livelihood of tech workers than if AI ends up panning out. This is something the naysayers need to grapple with. We’ve crossed a line where this tech…

> If it doesn’t, we are going to see over a trillion dollars of capital leave the tech sector, which I think will have worse impacts on the livelihood of tech workers than if AI ends up panning out.

I don't think it will be worse; if AI pans out the world would be able to continue without a single programmer left. If a trillion dollars leave the tech sector, all those programmers employed outside of the tech sector will still have jobs.

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

#278

Post by salawat »

Daishiman wrote: post #241
yakattak wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but you care which is my exact point.

How is this different from every single technological iteration?

Because there is a certain point where barrier to entry prevents meaningful competition once winner-take-all power laws start kicking in, and stability hitherto has been predisposed on having a plurality of non interrelated competitors to ensure no one man's quirks drives too much of societies theoretical output.

AI will make this dynamic worse, and it's got the extra danger of the default banal way of applying the technology in fact encourages it's application to that end.

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

#279

Post by simonw »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #265
user34283 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If you want an example of a project that condensed 5 years into 6 months and exploded past the competition I suggest looking at OpenClaw.

The first line of code was written on November 25th. It achieved adoption in the "personal agents" space that far exceeded the other companies that had tried the same thing.

(Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)

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