Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like • Hacker News Board

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

#341

Post by meridian-v » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:09 PM UTC

jakevoytko wrote: post #156

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…

Yeah, a lot of people came of age with a "we'll fix it when it's a problem" mindset. Previously their codebases would start to resist feature development, you'd fix the immediate bottlenecks, and then you could kick the can down the road a bit until you hit the next point of resistance. You kinda refactor as you do features. The frontier models have pushed the "it's a problem" moment further back. They can kinda work…

This is the sharpest observation in the thread. The "tension" you describe is proprioception for code — you feel where the abstractions leak, where the seams don't align, through the act of writing and refactoring. It's not a visual signal. You can't get it from reading a diff.

The risk isn't that agents write bad code. It's that developers lose the sense that tells them where code is bad. Code review is perception. Writing code is proprioception. They're different senses and one doesn't substitute for the other.

The question for the agent era isn't "is the code good enough to ship" — it's "do I still have enough coupling to the codebase to know when it isn't?"

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

#342

Post by sanderjd » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:10 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #119

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower, less panicked when production was down and could reason their way (slowly) through pretty much anything thrown at them. Opposite experience, I've sit next to developers who are trying their fastest to restore product…

This is true. But I find AI tools to be a huge help for all of this. Not to do any of it faster, but to remove a bunch of the tedium from the process of testing ideas and iterating on them. Instead of "I wonder if the problem is..." requiring half an hour of research, now I can do an initial check of that theory in less than a minute, and then dig further, or move onto the next one. Or say I estimate it's gonna take me an hour or more to test an idea, I might just decide I don't have time to invest in that. Well now maybe I can get a tentative answer on that by spending a minute laying out the theory and letting an agent spend ten or twenty minutes on it in the background. In this way I can explore space I just would have determined was not worth the effort previously.

To me, none of this feels like "going faster", it feels like "opening up possibilities to try more things, with a lot less tedious work".

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

#343

Post by sanderjd » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #150

embedding-shape wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower, less panicked when production was down and could reason their way (slowly) through pretty much anything thrown at them. Opposite experience, I've sit next to developers who are trying their fastest to restore product…

> Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower Unfortunately, a lot of workplaces are ignoring this, believing their engineers are assembly line workers, and the ones who complete 10 widgets per minute are simply better than the ones who complete 5 widgets per minute.

Which workplaces?

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

#344

Post by AndrewKemendo » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

BoorishBears wrote: post #322

hintymad wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

This is like having a coworker who's as skilled as you if not more skilled, but also an alien. Their mental model doesn't map cleanly enough to yours, and so where for a human you'd have some way to follow their thought patterns and identify mistakes, here the alien makes mistakes that don't add up. Like the alien has encyclopedic knowledge of op codes in some esoteric soviet MCU but sometimes forgets how to look for…

Some of my favorite peer engineers work exactly like that

People used to like them and they used to be legends (even if not everyone liked them)

Notch, Woz, Linus and Geohot come to mind

The Metasploit creator Dean McNamee worked for me and he was just like that and a total monster at engineering hard tech products

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

#345

Post by throwuxiytayq » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

sumeno wrote: post #314

hintymad wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Humans can't make mistakes at the sheer scale that AI can. Yes, as an engineer I make mistakes, but I could never make as many mistakes per day as an LLM can

Obviously, the measure isn’t mistakes per day, it’s mistakes per LOC. And that’s not the whole story either - AI self-corrects in addition to being corrected by the operator. If the operator’s committed bugs/LOC rate is as low as the unaugmented programmer’s bugs/LOC, you always choose the AI operator. If it’s higher, it might still be viable to choose them if you care about velocity more than correctness. I’m a slow, methodical programmer myself, but it’s not clear to me that I have a moat.

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

#346

Post by sanderjd » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:11 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #224

nathan_compton wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just that they believe this - they want a business model where this is how it works. For a big company a star coder is a liability - they have strong labor power, they can leave and they are hard to replace, etc. Companies want workflows that work with mediocre programmers because they are more like interchangeable parts. This is the real secret to why AI programming will work in a lot of places. If you look…

To these kinds of companies, what's even better than a rack of mediocre programmers? AI agents that you can just conjure up and prompt. They take up no facility space, don't require lunch breaks or vacations, obey all commands and direction, and produce a predictable and consistent amount of output per dollar. This is the earworm the leaders of these companies have allowed into their minds. Like Agent Mulder, they Wa…

Yeah but does this work? Are there companies doing this successfully?

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

#347

Post by CharlieDigital » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

asdfman123 wrote: post #293

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…

You can direct LLMs to do test-driven development, though. Write several tests, then make sure the code matches it. And also make sure the agent organizes the code correctly.

The LLM obliges and writes a lot of useless tests. I have asked devs to delete several tests in the last day alone.

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

#348

Post by sanderjd » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:12 PM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #328

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Good engineers need to be allowed to be good. If they are told to pump features or lose their job, they might act like bad engineers as well.

Aren't they more likely to leave?

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

#349

Post by keeda » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #312

keeda wrote: post #246

I think all coding will become vibe coding, but it will be no less an engineering discipline. Note: I still review pretty much every line of code that I own, regardless of who generates it, and I see the problems with agents very clearly... but I can also see the trends. My take: Instead of crafting code, engineering will shift to crafting bespoke, comprehensive validation mechanisms for the results of the agents' wo…

This is complete insanity for anyone that actually works on production-grade, hundred billion dollar systems that are critical to the function of the global economy. Other than for your own pet projects, almost all of what you said has no place for "vibe engineering" / or "vibe coding" on serious software engineering products that are needed in life and death situations.

That may be true for highly critical systems, but those are a tiny, tiny, tiny minority of all software projects. I mean, how many engineers work on aviation or automotive or X-ray machine or other life-and-death code compared to pretty much anything else?

And not all "production-grade, hundred billion dollar systems" are that critical. Like, Claude Code as we all know is clearly vibe-coded and is already a 10-billion (and rapidly increasing!) dollar system. Google Search and various Meta apps meet those criteria and people are already using LLMs on that code, and will soon be "vibe coding" as I described it.

AWS meets that criteria and has already had an LLM-caused outage! But that's not stopping them from doing even more AI coding. In fact I bet they will invest in more validation suites instead, because those are a good idea anyways. After all, all the cloud providers have been having outages long before the age of LLMs.

The thing most people are missing is that code is cheap, and so automated validations are cheap, and you get more bang for the buck by throwing more code in the form of extensive tests and validations at it than human attention.

Edited to add: I think I can rephrase the last line better thus: you get more bang for the buck by throwing human attention at extensive automated tests and validations of the code rather than at the code itself.

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

#350

Post by somewhereoutth » Wed, May 06, 2026, 11:13 PM UTC

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.

Prior to the advent of LLMs, I had this concept of the 'complexity horizon' - essentially a [hand built] software system will naturally tend to get more and more complex until no-one can understand it - until it meets the complexity horizon. And there it stays, being essentially unmaintainable.

With LLMs, you can race right for that horizon, go right through, and continue far beyond! But then of course you find yourself in a place without reason (the real hell), with all the horror and madness that that entails.