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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

#301

Post by layer8 »

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…

The difference is that the complexity to achieve “Hello World” was the same for everyone, and more or less well-understood and documented. With AI, you get some different random spaghetti slop each time.

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

#302

Post by hintymad »

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 don't think that AIs have become more trustworthy, the errors are just more subtle.

Honest question: what about the counter-argument that humans make subtle mistakes all the time, so why do we treat AI any differently?

A difference to me is that when we manually write code, we reason about the code carefully with a purpose. Yes we do make mistakes, but the mistakes are grounded in a certain range. In contrast, AI generated code creates errors that do not follow common sense. That said, I don't feel this differentiation is strong enough, and I don't have data to back it up.

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

#303

Post by valcron1000 »

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…

> if it’s a solo greenfield project

That's a big if. I don't have numbers but most professional engineers are not working on such projects

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

#304

Post by keeganpoppen »

wek wrote: post #230

What an excellent article by a smart, humble, still-learning person! Favorite quote:" There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them. [...] I’m constantly reminded as I work with these tools…

it’s sad that i had to triple-read this to determine you weren’t being sarcastic. sad for whom? i don’t know. but the amplifier take is exactly the right one.

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

#305

Post by mschuster91 »

retinaros wrote: post #288
simonw wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Its trash vibecoded markdown files around pi. This exemplifies well what op’is saying. We are at the ICO stage of llms. Hopefully there wont be an nft one

As much as I love to hate on AI: even the bad apples still produce something that one can reasonably work with.

Cryptocurrencies? Barely any other use than money laundering, buying drugs and betting on the outcome of battles in war. And NFTs? No use at all other than money laundering and setting money ablaze.

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

#306

Post by sva_ »

devin wrote: post #39

> If you can go from producing 200 lines of code a day to 2,000 lines of code a day, what else breaks? The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code. And now it doesn’t. It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.

I wonder if '2000 LOC' was chosen to refer to this old anecdote from the 80s:

https://www.folklore.org/Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.html

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71
etothet wrote: post #33

Vibe Coding (and LLMs) did not create undisciplined engineering organizations or engineers. They exposed and accelerated them. Plenty of engineers have loose (or no!) standards and practices over how they write coee. Similarly, plenty of engineering teams have weak and loose standards over how code gets pushed to production. This concept isn't new, it's just a lot easier for individuals and teams who have never reall…

Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good. I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster. The best engineers I know were ones who drew on experience and careful consideration and shared critical insights with their team that steered the direction of the system positively. > Claude, engineer a system for me, but do it good. Thanks!

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by demorro »

jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #11
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…

If that is the case market forces would likely favor hand written code and all the slop will be forgotten (unless the slop works fine and is stable).

Absurd. Market forces don't optimize for quality, reliability or human welfare. This is religious thinking.

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

#309

Post by truncate »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71
etothet wrote: post #33

Vibe Coding (and LLMs) did not create undisciplined engineering organizations or engineers. They exposed and accelerated them. Plenty of engineers have loose (or no!) standards and practices over how they write coee. Similarly, plenty of engineering teams have weak and loose standards over how code gets pushed to production. This concept isn't new, it's just a lot easier for individuals and teams who have never reall…

Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good. I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster. The best engineers I know were ones who drew on experience and careful consideration and shared critical insights with their team that steered the direction of the system positively. > Claude, engineer a system for me, but do it good. Thanks!

>> Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good.

I don't know if good engineers can necessarily continue to be good. There is limit to how much careful consideration one can give if everything is on an accelerated timeline. Regardless good or not, there is limit on how much influence you have on setting those timelines. The whole playing field is changing.

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

#310

Post by demorro »

switchbak wrote: post #85
sesky wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the quality of code was already very bad due to market forces. Most code at large companies is notoriously poor despite the talent density, because the incentives are not there to tackle tech debt or improve code quality. With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the mo…

The same incentives that discourage good code in pre-AI times are still dominating now. You will be pushed to ship sub-par products in the future, just like you were in the past. AI certainly has the potential to make the underlying code/design a lot cleaner. We will also be working with dramatically more code, at a much higher rate of change. That alone will be a big challenge to keep sustainable. The ones making th…

The only thing that has changed is that there used to be a loose correlation between capability to effect change and inherent desire for quality. This correlation barely exists anymore, so the counter-cultural acts that happened to manifest quality inside our perverse systems will occur much more rarely now.
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