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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

#441

Post by xantronix »

user34283 wrote: post #257
xantronix wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know there are good uses of LLMs out there. I do. But. The current fever pitch mandates from above seem to want it applied liberally, and pushing back against that is so discouraging and often career-limiting as to wear the fabric of one's psyche threadbare. With all the obvious problems being pointed out to people, there are just as many workarounds; and these workarounds, as is often revealed shortly thereafter,…

In my opinion you are just wrong. It’s an absolute game changer, and it can now multiply your productivity fivefold if it’s a solo greenfield project. Maybe half a year ago it was as you said. You had to wait for the agent to finish, you had to review carefully, and often the result was not that great. You did not save a lot of time. Now I can spin up 3+ parallel conversations in Codex, each in a git worktree. My wor…

The thing is, I don't care any longer. I sincerely believe velocity without direction is not a good strategy for delivering quality in the long term. And that's the thing about it: How sustainable is this velocity, in terms of socioeconomic concerns, product strategy, and mental health?

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

#443

Post by dreambuffer »

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.

This assumes:

- that you spend no amount of time looking things up, reorganising, or otherwise getting stuck

- that you have a solution to the problem ready to go at all times

- that your solution is better than the LLM's solution

I highly, highly doubt that all 3 of these are true. I doubt even 1 of them is true, I think you just don't know how to use LLMs in a focused way.

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

#444

Post by derangedHorse »

xmprt wrote: post #431
apsurd wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perfect…

I was thinking of this interpretation as I read that:

"I'll go in the other direction and say that if you're spending a lot of your time learning to [program] better then you're wasting it because [computer]s are only going to get better at [computing] regardless of "[software] engineering". The JSON API example to wire up a database can be [run] pretty easily by the latest [computer]s without much [design] and without setting up any [optimizations]. The more time you spend perfecting your [program], the more time you would have wasted when the next [computer] comes out to make it obsolete."

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

#445

Post by tyyyy3 »

sumeno wrote: post #438
jmilloy wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think its a direct reflection of the fact that most people really prefer to go-go-go and not spend the time up-front thinking about what their project even is, why it matters and is it worth dedicated resources toward it. The abandonment usually reflects the answer - no it was not worth it.

LLMs amplify this behaviour.

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

#446

Post by patrick-elmore »

meridian-v wrote: post #341
jakevoytko wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[dead]

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

#447

Post by weird-eye-issue »

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.

I use voice to text and for me coding is way faster now. You don't need to sit down and type up a perfect spec lol. I give it terrible prompts with poor grammar and typos from incorrect transcriptions and it does an amazing job. Definitely not perfect I iterate with it a ton but it's still faster than typing it out by hand

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

#448

Post by svieira »

Daishiman wrote: post #317
callc wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, we must force these obstinate engineers to the right path! Only after getting everyone to see the light will they understand and thank us for boundless productivity!! /s Perhaps these “obstinate” engineers have good reason in their decision. And it should be their decision! To be so confident in what is “the right way (TM)” and try to force it onto others is... revealing.

I ran the statistics myself and my company is spending 40% less time doing feature development since AI agents began to be used en masse and pushing 50% more tickets without any noticeable increase in regressions. After 18 months the hard evidence is in place. And much like replacing bare-metal servers for many use cases where evidence shows that the burden of k8s or the substitution of shell scripts for Terraform, i…

What did you use to fill the time you aren't doing feature development in with? Or are you all now working 20 hour work weeks?

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

#449

Post by deadbabe »

dyauspitr wrote: post #203
deadbabe wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of times an engineer says what the fuck while reading code still seems like a reliable metric for code quality assessment.

We won’t be doing that for much longer, enjoy it while you can.

I’m sure an agent can audibly play “what the fuck” as it crunches tokens reading through a codebase

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

#450

Post by simonw »

mlsu wrote: post #286
simonw wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want an example of a project that condensed 5 years into 6 months and exploded past the competition I suggest looking at OpenClaw. The first line of code was written on November 25th. It achieved adoption in the "personal agents" space that far exceeded the other companies that had tried the same thing. (Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time.…

Ideally, the given example would be something not ajacent to the presently white-hot category of "AI agents". Like, look at e.g. YC minus the AI and AI ajacent companies. Are those startups meaningfully more impressive or feature-rich as compared to a couple years ago?

Not yet, no. I think that's because coding agents got good in November, most people didn't notice until January and it still takes 3-4 months to go from idea to releasing something.

I expect we will start seeing the impact of the new coding agent enhanced development processes over the next few months.

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