I still don’t get what agentic engineering is. Isn’t it all just asking the same LLM what you want it to do?
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
421–430 of 958 posts
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#422Have you noticed that the coding agents get really close to the solution on the first one shot and then require tons of work to get that last 10% or 5%? If we shift the paradigm of how we approach a coding problem, the coding agents can close that gap. Ten years ago every 10 or 15 minutes I would stop coding and start refactoring, testing, and analyzing making sure everything is perfect before proceeding because a bu…
Yes! Anthropic team calls this “regenerate, don’t fix.” The person who builds an agentic IDE or GitHub alternative that natively does the process you describe will be a multibillionare.
> https://github.com/adam-s/agent-tuning
Do you want a demo of what this is capable of?
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#423The real paradigm shift is not here yet, but not very far away. I'm talking about the single unified codebase. Agents building a unique codebase for all your software needs. Because most of the complexity in software comes from interfacing with external components, when you don't need to adapt to this you can write simpler and better code. Rather than relying on an external library, you just write your own and have f…
> Standardize data and services and you don't need that much software.
We've known this since close to the advent of computing and yet every generation of has taken us further away from this goal. Largely driven by jealous resource-guarding, particularly when it comes to data. Why don't I have a generic media player app that can stream Netflix, Disney, Hulu, etc? Those brands want control over my experience. They will continue to want that control indefinitely. That basic human desire for control won't evaporate with a "single unified codebase".
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, validation is key. The smartest thing I've heard on this, which has reoriented how I think about this is that the objective function of a piece of software is now more important to get right than the implementation.
> the objective function of a piece of software is now more important to get right than the implementation That has always been the case. That is why weeks or even months of programming and other project busy work could replace a couple of days of time getting properly fleshed out requirements down.
Agreed, it has always been the case. But I've never thought of it that way so explicitly. And I might argue that the important distinction is that the objective function is programmatically verifiable (which the word "requirements" has not always implied).
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#425What 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…
What do you do if you don't have that existing experience? How do you build it up?
Build it up in your free time. It's extraordinarily valuable to build up those skills, and I'm not convinced that companies will allow time to slow down and build them.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#426> 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…
I’ve seen the best REST APIs since Claude Code has taken the wheel Every verb implemented, and implemented correctly according to the obscure IETF and most compatible way when the IETF never made it clear Intuitively named routes, error, authentication all easily done and swappable for another if necessary I feel like our timeline split if you’re not seeing this
the obscure IETF? Which standard is that exactly? Who cares guess - Claude do that stuff.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm, I think I disagree with this. I estimate that I'm now spending about 10 to 30 hours less time a week in the mechanical parts of writing and refactoring code, researching how to plumb components together, and doing "figure out how to do unfamiliar thing" research. All of those hours are time that can now be spent doing "careful consideration" (or just being with my family or at the gym or reading a book, which i…
Maybe we do different things. Not that you are wrong about spending less time on things that you don't care about, but at the same time all that mechanical things helps you build a really good mental model of your product from high level design to individual classes. If I already have a good mental model of that I can direct AI to make really good changes fast, if I don't I will get things done ... but it does end up…
I guess I just don't really agree that doing the tedious mechanical things is all that helpful for building the necessary mental model. I mean, I do think it was useful (indeed, necessary) for me to actually type out very similar lines of code over and over again when I was building up the programming skillset, but I really think the marginal value of that is just very low for me at this point. I worry a lot about how we're going to train the next generation of people without there being any incentive to do this part of the process! But for me, I already did that part.
What I find is actually necessary for me to have a mental model of the system is not typing out the definitions of the classes and such, but rather operating and debugging the system. I really do need to try to do things, and dig into logs, and figure out what's going on when something is off. And pretty much always ends up requiring reading and understanding a bunch of the implementation. But whether I personally typed out that implementation, or one of my colleagues, or an AI, is less important.
I mean, I already had to be able to build a mental model of a system that I didn't fully implement myself! I essentially never work on anything that I have developed in its entirety on my own.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#428Repeat after me: most software spends the majority of its lifetime in the maintenance phase. Repeat after me: it follows that most of the money the software makes occurs during the maintenance phase. Repeat after me: our industry still does not understand this after almost 100 years of being in existence. Alan Kay was 100% right when he said that the computer revolution hasn't occurred yet. For all of our current adv…
I hate code and I want as little of it as possible in my codebase.
The best code is no code. The second-best code is the code I delete.
My favorite JIRAs are the ones I prevent from being worked on in the first place because they were unnecessary.
The ideal prompt is the one I don't fire because it would be a waste.
In an application with an LLM component, the ideal amount of inference is zero.
Ultimately this seems to lead to "the ideal amount of computers in the world is none" but for the sake of my continued employment let's let that one go by. :)
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmmm, I think I disagree with this. I estimate that I'm now spending about 10 to 30 hours less time a week in the mechanical parts of writing and refactoring code, researching how to plumb components together, and doing "figure out how to do unfamiliar thing" research. All of those hours are time that can now be spent doing "careful consideration" (or just being with my family or at the gym or reading a book, which i…
Yeah! I mean, who needs to LEARN how to to these things properly when you can just let an autocorrect on steroids hallucinate the closest thing to “barely working”. Right? 10 to 30 hours saved on not learning new things! Hurray!
I genuinely don't understand what you're talking about with this comment. Learn how to do what things properly? I've been writing software for two decades... I'm not primarily in a learning phase, I'm in a doing phase. I'll take advantage of tools that save me time and energy in my work (for the right price). Why wouldn't I?
What do you mean by "barely working"? I can now put more iterations into getting things working better, more quickly, with less effort. That seems good to me.
10 to 30 hours a week is 25% to 75% of my time working. Seems like a pretty good trade?
I do understand that the calculation is different for people who are new to this. And I worry a lot about how people will build their skills and expertise when there is no incentive to put in all the tedious legwork. But that just isn't the phase of my career that I'm in...
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
"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","
Or maybe just maybe... the thing should be much better designed around the human.
That's how personal computers made their way into homes. People like yourself are comical and can't understand how widespread adoption takes place to obtain value from what the thing intrinsically possesses.
Firms literally exist to take care of the hassle so that the person can get the value from the thing closer to the present - like hello...?