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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

#401

Post by pylua »

tuom1s wrote: post #86
drfloyd51 wrote: post #49

It is pure arrogance to expect that machines will never be able to code as good as a skilled human. And AI generated code should be different than human code. AI has infinite memory for details. AI doesn’t need organizational patterns like classes. Potentially AI can write code that is more performant than any human. Will it look like garbage? Sure. Will the code be more suited to the task? Yes.

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…

Eventually I would bet on ai using its own non human readable languages (brains?) to program in to reduce overhead.

It will be a black box, and the code will be generated just in time by ai for each api request

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

#402

Post by spoiler »

jwpapi wrote: post #396
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I know the answer to all these questions, wiring it together takes me LESS time than passing it to Claude Code How so?

Like writing code to me is not slower than writing text? When I write code every character I type in my computer has less ambiguity than when I write it in human language? I also have the help of LSPs, Linters and Auto-completes.

It's not much to go on by, but I kinda feel ya. I think one exception I'd perhaps make is doing a large mechanic refactor. I find them incredibly daunting. So, I'll just ask AI for that. I mean it probably takes me a similar time to do, but it feels less daunting.

I've been trying to get into agentic coding and there are non-refactoring instances where I might reac for it (like any time I need to work on something using tailwind; I'm dyslexic and I'd get actual headaches, not exaggerating, trying to decipher Tailwind gibberish while juggling their docs before AIs came around)

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

#403

Post by nly »

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!

The best paid engineers I know seem to be the super fast hackers who write unfathomable amounts of code in short order.

Unfortunately thoughtful design and engineering doesn't get recognised

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

#404

Post by bdangubic »

nly wrote: post #403
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!

The best paid engineers I know seem to be the super fast hackers who write unfathomable amounts of code in short order. Unfortunately thoughtful design and engineering doesn't get recognised

in my experience this is because there are very very very very few thoughtful designers and engineers, especially compared to people that are cranking out code.

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

#405

Post by BoorishBears »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #344
BoorishBears wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No they don't because they have brains.

I have no strong idea why people can't accept that intelligence formed separately of a human brain can truly be alien: not in the hyperbolic sense of "that person is so unique it's like they're a different species", but "that thing does not have a brain, so it can have intelligence that is not human-like".

A human without a brain would die. An LLM doesn't have a brain and can do wonderous things.

It just does them in ways that require first accepting that there is no homo sapien thinks like an LLM.

We trained it on human language so often times it borrows our thought traces so to speak, but effective agentic systems form when you first erase your preconceived notions of how intelligence works and actually study this non-human intelligence and find new ways to apply it.

It's like the early days of agents when everyone thought if you just made an agent for each job role in a company and stuck them in a virtual office handing off work to each other it'd solve everything, but then Claude Code took off and showed that a simple brain dead loop could outperform that.

Now subagents almost always are task specific, not role specific.

I feel like we could leap ahead a decade if people could divorce "we use language, and it uses language so it is like us", but I think there's just something really challenging about that because it's never been true.

Nothing had this level of mastery over human language before that wasn't a human. And funnily enough, the first times we even came close (like Eliza) the same exact thing happened: so this seems like a persistent gap in how humans deal with non-humans using language.

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

#406

Post by eric_cc »

jwpapi wrote: post #373

> I know full well that if you ask Claude Code to build a JSON API endpoint that runs a SQL query and outputs the results as JSON, it’s just going to do it right. It’s not going to mess that up. You have it add automated tests, you have it add documentation, you know it’s going to be good. I feel like this is just not true. An JSON API endpoint also needs several decisions made. - How should the endpoint be named - W…

You can also just talk it out loud to Claude while you’re on a walk getting some sunshine. Done.

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

#407

Post by jwpapi »

spoiler wrote: post #402
jwpapi wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like writing code to me is not slower than writing text? When I write code every character I type in my computer has less ambiguity than when I write it in human language? I also have the help of LSPs, Linters and Auto-completes.

It's not much to go on by, but I kinda feel ya. I think one exception I'd perhaps make is doing a large mechanic refactor. I find them incredibly daunting. So, I'll just ask AI for that. I mean it probably takes me a similar time to do, but it feels less daunting. I've been trying to get into agentic coding and there are non-refactoring instances where I might reac for it (like any time I need to work on something us…

I use Jetbrains features for that usually, it has great tools for that.

Lets say on that JSON API I want to extract part of the logic in a repositiory file i CTRL + W the function then I have almost all of my shortcuts with left alt + two character shortcuts. So once marked i do LAlt + E + M for Extract Method then it puts me in a step in between to rename the function and then LAlt + M+V for MoVe and then it puts me in an interface to name the function.

Once you used to it its like a gamer doing APMS and its deterministic and fast. I also have R+N (rename), G+V (generate vitest) Q+C(query console), Q+H(Query history) and many more. Really useful. Probably also doable with other editors.

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

#408

Post by rvz »

tempaccount5050 wrote: post #382
rvz wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost no one works on stuff like that, so congrats on finding a corner case I guess.

Complete nonsense.

There are people who write software for hedge funds, quant firms, aviation and defense systems, data center providers, major telecom services used by hospitals and emergency services and semiconductor firms and the big oil and energy companies and that is NOT "almost no-one" and these companies see and make hundreds of billions of dollars a year on average.

This is even before me mentioning big tech.

Perhaps the work most here on this site are doing is not serious enough that can be totally vibe-coded and are toy projects and bring in close to $0 for the company to not care.

What I am talking about is the software that is responsible for being the core revenue driver of the business and it being also mission critical.

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

#409

Post by jwpapi »

yieldcrv wrote: post #400
jwpapi wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t want every verb implemented, I also dont want an IETF standard. I want as little as possible, so I have to worry about as little as possible in the future. Use-cases differ, you described a complete REST API, which can be as much of a problem as a too little.

Then just tell it to do that It'll even suggest it You want a single RPC websocket go for it

Till it has explored the codebase, asked me follow up questions, suggested the code change, incorporating my fixes after losing time on context switch + the extra time I need when somebody requests a change in 3 months to learn the mental model. I’m way faster to just write it myself (mental model included)

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

#410

Post by jwpapi »

eric_cc wrote: post #406
jwpapi wrote: post #373

> I know full well that if you ask Claude Code to build a JSON API endpoint that runs a SQL query and outputs the results as JSON, it’s just going to do it right. It’s not going to mess that up. You have it add automated tests, you have it add documentation, you know it’s going to be good. I feel like this is just not true. An JSON API endpoint also needs several decisions made. - How should the endpoint be named - W…

You can also just talk it out loud to Claude while you’re on a walk getting some sunshine. Done.

Yeah I can and I’ve done it and for fun project it’s fun and cool. But its like using templates to build your website. You’ll be annoyed and at one point your project goes in the endless graveyary of abandoned projects
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