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

Post by BoorishBears » Wed, May 06, 2026, 10:37 PM UTC

hintymad wrote: post #302

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…

Post by tom1337 » Wed, May 06, 2026, 10:42 PM UTC

lumost wrote: post #321

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…

Honestly, the problem is one of BS detection. Lead engineer says something is not workable? Pm overrides saying that Claude code could do it. Problems found months later at launch and now the engineers are on the hook. New junior onboardee declares that their new vision is the best and gets management onto it cuz it’s trendy -> broken app. It’s made collaboration nearly unbearable as you are beholden to the person wi…

Post by jaggederest » Wed, May 06, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

zbentley wrote: post #325

jaggederest wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be absolutely shocked how many software projects are still run, to this day, without source control at all. Or automated (or manual) testing. And how many hand crafted artisanal servers are running on AWS, never to be recovered if their EC2 instance is killed for some reason.

Sure, but that’s a small and shrinking market. Not a source of economic security or growth for its employees, nor for most of its companies (though some have defended niches).

Post by LtWorf » Wed, May 06, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

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!

Post by sfjailbird » Wed, May 06, 2026, 10:51 PM UTC

drmajormccheese wrote: post #65

There are techniques for improving our confidence in our software: unit testing, integration testing, fuzz testing, property-based testing, static analysis, model checking, theorem proving, formal methods, etc. The LLM is not only a tool for generating lines of code. It can also generate lines of testing. The goal is that the tests are easier to audit by the humans than the code.