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

#431

Post by xmprt » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:25 AM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #419

eddieroger wrote: post #416

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. That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing prompts yet. > Take the todo_items table in Postgres and build a Micronaut API based around it. The base URL should be /v1/todo_items. You can connect to Postgres with pguser:pgpass@1.2.3.4 That's about all it takes these…

I've drank the AI koolaid so I'm not a hater, but to say "you're just not prompting right" is such a cop-out. Prompting right takes a metric fuck ton of effort. I'm actually kinda agreeing with you, if you make it to where you're dev environment is sufficiently harnessed, then you can give it one-liner magic prompts. But getting there, learning to get there, paying that cost, hot mother of god it's a lot of effort. C…

I'll go in the other direction and say that if you're spending a lot of your time learning to prompt better then you're wasting it because LLMs are only going to get better at understanding your intent regardless of "prompt engineering". The JSON API example to wire up a database can be one-shot pretty easily by the latest models without much context and without setting up any harness. The more time you spend perfecting your harness, the more time you would have wasted when the next model comes out to make it obsolete.

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

#432

Post by beeandapenguin » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #357

truncate wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

It's deeper. We used to mock architects that stepped back and stopped coding, because they generated trash. There's a cycle that is needed for good system design. Start with a problem and an approach, and write some code. As you write the code, you reify the design and flesh out the edge cases, learning where you got the details wrong. As you learn the details, you go back to the drawing board and shuffle the puzzle…

Reminds me of Gall’s Law from his book Systemantics.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall's_law

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

#433

Post by untrust » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

overfeed wrote: post #311

ryandrake wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> This is the earworm the leaders of these companies have allowed into their minds. Like Agent Mulder, they Want To Believe in this so badly... If you assume they are not idiots and analyze the FOMO incentives via a little game-theory, it becomes clear why. Assuming the competition has adopted AI, leadership can ignore it, or pursue it. If they adopt it, then they are level with the completion whether AI actually suc…

What if the outcome is the competition burns their money on LLM usage for little to no gain? If you're an exec and you jumped into LLMs as well then you also lose any advantage you would have had by saving your money or hiring a few more humans.

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

#434

Post by jmalicki » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

rgbrenner wrote: post #387

jmalicki wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes it not a context window. How to organize code like you said, and how agents interact with it, to keep the actual context window small is the fundamental challenge.

ok "series of context windows spread across many agents".. sure much clearer. Doesn't change my point: the amount of code the agent can operate on is very large, if not unlimited, as long as you put even a little bit of thought into structuring things so it can be divided along a boundary. If you let the codebase degrade into spaghetti, then the LLM is going to have the same problem any engineer would have with that.…

Context windows don't necessarily cleanly divide. Getting each agent to be able to task within a context window is a hard problem.

It's like like if your context window with one agent is n, your context window with 10 agents is n/10. It is some skill, but that is also where a lot of the advances are coming in.

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

#435

Post by phpnode » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #419

eddieroger wrote: post #416

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. That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing prompts yet. > Take the todo_items table in Postgres and build a Micronaut API based around it. The base URL should be /v1/todo_items. You can connect to Postgres with pguser:pgpass@1.2.3.4 That's about all it takes these…

I've drank the AI koolaid so I'm not a hater, but to say "you're just not prompting right" is such a cop-out. Prompting right takes a metric fuck ton of effort. I'm actually kinda agreeing with you, if you make it to where you're dev environment is sufficiently harnessed, then you can give it one-liner magic prompts. But getting there, learning to get there, paying that cost, hot mother of god it's a lot of effort. C…

it does take a little while to get good at this new skill, yes. Just like, say, learning a new programming language and the ecosystem around it takes some effort. After you get over the hump it's really very straightforward and mostly a matter of knowing the kinds of mistakes the LLM is likely to make ahead of time, and then kindly asking it to do something smarter. If you've successfully mentored junior engineers you already have this skill.

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

#436

Post by yakbarber » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:27 AM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #419

eddieroger wrote: post #416

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. That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing prompts yet. > Take the todo_items table in Postgres and build a Micronaut API based around it. The base URL should be /v1/todo_items. You can connect to Postgres with pguser:pgpass@1.2.3.4 That's about all it takes these…

I've drank the AI koolaid so I'm not a hater, but to say "you're just not prompting right" is such a cop-out. Prompting right takes a metric fuck ton of effort. I'm actually kinda agreeing with you, if you make it to where you're dev environment is sufficiently harnessed, then you can give it one-liner magic prompts. But getting there, learning to get there, paying that cost, hot mother of god it's a lot of effort. C…

this seems disingenuous. even if your premise is true (which i don't think it is), it only really holds for the first few endpoints. most systems have many, and the models are very good at copying established patterns to the point that you wouldn't normally have to re-explain every detail for every endpoint. so you might be right for the first (you're not), but you're definitely wrong for the next 50.

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

#437

Post by eddieroger » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:29 AM UTC

apsurd wrote: post #419

eddieroger wrote: post #416

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. That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing prompts yet. > Take the todo_items table in Postgres and build a Micronaut API based around it. The base URL should be /v1/todo_items. You can connect to Postgres with pguser:pgpass@1.2.3.4 That's about all it takes these…

I've drank the AI koolaid so I'm not a hater, but to say "you're just not prompting right" is such a cop-out. Prompting right takes a metric fuck ton of effort. I'm actually kinda agreeing with you, if you make it to where you're dev environment is sufficiently harnessed, then you can give it one-liner magic prompts. But getting there, learning to get there, paying that cost, hot mother of god it's a lot of effort. C…

I disagree it's a cop-out, but I agree it's hard to get good at writing prompts and takes a lot of effort. But so is programming. We're trading one skill set for another and getting a bigger return on it.

I started as a skeptic and have similarly drank the kool-aid. The reality is AI can read code faster than I can, including following code paths. It can build and keep more context than I can, and do it faster as well. And it can write code faster than I can type. So the effort to learn how to tell it what to do is worthwhile.

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

#438

Post by sumeno » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:32 AM UTC

jmilloy wrote: post #418

jwpapi wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think most people are finding the opposite. Claude Code is not only reducing how many projects get abandoned, it's also resurrecting projects from the graveyard.

The number of Show HNs recently that have a days worth of commits and are never touched again disagrees. It's creating a lot of projects that are immediately abandoned

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

#439

Post by phpnode » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:33 AM UTC

jwpapi wrote: post #409

yieldcrv wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

If it's genuinely the case that you can write code faster than you can prompt it into existence then you're not being ambitious enough with your coding agent. Ask it to do more. Tackle bigger problems.

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

#440

Post by u8 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 1:42 AM UTC

The disconnect for AI is that it is a jagged frontier and it only really shines when one of its jagged frontiers extends counter to one of your valleys.

If you've been writing Perl for 30 years, you might not want to learn JavaScript just to make a little fun idea in your head to show your wife. Vibe code that shit man. Who cares? Your wife does not care about LOC or those internal design decisions you made.

If you're trying to learn something new like an algorithm, protocol, or API write that shit by hand. You learn by doing, and when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI. Also, when did we stop liking to learn? Why is it a bad thing to know all the ins and outs of a programming language? To write and make all the decisions yourself? That shit is fun. I don't care if you disagree.

If you're at work and they really care about getting something out of the door, do whatever you think is best. If you just wanna ship vibed code and review PRs all day, all the power to you. If you wanna write it by hand, and use AI like a scalpel to write up boiler plate, review code, do PR audits, etc... go for it!

A hammer is a really great tool that has thousands of purpose-designed uses. I still prefer my key to get into my car. It's all tools, you are a person.

A lot of this stuff if coming top-down from people who do not have the experience you do. Wouldn't a smart employee use their expertise to advise the organization? If you work at a company where that would not be okay, maybe it's time to start looking for another firm.