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

simonwillison.net

461–470 of 958 posts

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

#461
I mean... yeah? Isn't it obvious that they're essentially the same thing, but one thinks they're in a higher class than the other?

Fast feedback loops and delegating tasks to sub-agents have been pretty common for vibers since well before they were canonicalized by agenteers. Same thing, different day, hardly even any difference in quality: they evolve together, though vibe tends to lead and agents follow and refine... which vibers then use too.

If you think of vibe coders as agentic alpha testers it makes a lot more sense.

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

#462
post #440

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'r…

Some people actually don't really like to learn new things. If the machine spits out plausible working code, they'd be perfectly happy with that. Personally I think AI is doing a lot more harm than good and I can't wait for the bubble to burst.

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

#463
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. It's unclear why creating more code faster is a good thing. Software engineering wisdom for decades has been that code is a cost, not a product. There are great reasons for that, which haven't changed with the appearance of LLMs.

2. There absolutely are cases where modifying code "manually" is unquestionably faster than prompting an LLM. There are trivial examples for this - eg only an insane person would ask an LLM to rename a variable rather than using an LSP for that. It would provably and consistently take more keystrokes. There are less trivial examples as well, like, you know, having an understanding of your codebase and using good abstractions/libraries within it that let you make large changes to the program's behavior with little boilerplate code.

One can argue that producing a lot of complex changes through an LLM is faster, which I would agree with, but then see point #1. Sustainable software development has up to this point relied on iterative discovery of the right small components that together form a complete, functional, stable system (see "Programming as Theory Building").

There's zero indication so far that LLMs are capable of speeding up the process of creating complete, functional, stable systems. What every org within my career and friend circle is seeing (and research into productivity impacts of LLMs on software development is showing) is the same story - fast prototypes that either turn into abandonware, personal tools, or maintenance nightmares.

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

#464
post #365

Here's for the AI supremacists: Let's assume AI is 10x perfect than humnas in accuracy and produces 10x less bugs and increases the speed by 1000x compared to a very capable software engineer. Now imagine this: A car travels at a road that has 10x more bumps but it is traveling 1000x slower pace so even though there are 10x bumps, your ride will feel less bumpy because you're encountering them at far lower pace. Now…

I will 100% agree with this. It just feels very scary to see entire teams completely handing off all coding needs and testing needs and also design needs for that matter, to AI. This not only makes people lose their touch but also allows them to push insane amounts of code every day. PRs get impossible to review for humans because they are too huge and they add too much burden so they unsurprisingly use AI to review those things again. And with the amount of code churn, nobody knows what exactly is being implemented. And I have seen first hand that as the size of the code base grows, tracing problems and actually debugging things when things go wrong gets incredibly rough and complex.

And AI that has been helping all this time will suddenly stop helping out with this one use case. I have experienced AI running in circles, in this case trying to find a root cause. It failed, and the user is left holding the bag. That is when you feel like you have just been dropped into a vast ocean without a lifeboat. Then you'll have to just start looking through those massive chunks of vibe-coded crap to understand what is going on.

AI is good in terms of improving speed, but I am afraid we are massively taking it the wrong way as engineers. Everyone is just letting it go on autopilot and make it do things completely from start to end. The ideal solution lies where every piece of code it writes is reviewed by authors, and they make sure they are not checking in crazy stuff day in and day out.

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

#465
I can't really say I agree with this, although I also hate the phrase "agentic engineering".

I'm working on a licensing system for a product I'm building. I've used Claude a little bit to help out with it, but it's also made a lot of very dumb decisions that would have large (security!) consequences if I didn't catch them. And a lot of them are braindead things, like I asked it to create a configurable limit on a certain resource for the trial version of the application. When I said configurable, I mostly meant: put the number in a constant so I can update it later. What Claude thought I asked was "make it so the user can modify the limits of the trial version in the settings panel" (which defeats the entire purpose of a free trial!). Another thing it messed up recently is I was setting up email-magic-link authentication. It defaulted to creating an account for anyone that typed in an email, which could allow a bad actor to both spam people with login requests (probably getting me kicked off Resend) or creating a lot of bogus accounts.

These things do not think. You cannnot outsource your thinking to them.

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

#466
post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

bro is probably using a local LLM at 2 tokens/sec

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

#467
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.

I see you haven't encountered an API where a GET command can modify the database.

Similarly, I once worked somewhere that had an HTTP API that returned status code 200 {“error”: “ok”} to indicate an error occurred.

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

#468
post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tec…

I would prefer hedge funds and traders to vibe code their software. Heck I am willing to do it if I mist.

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

#469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One answer, as another person pointed out, is that LLM mistakes are just different . They are less explicable, less predictable, and therefore harder to spot. I can easily anticipate how an inexperienced engineer is going to mess up their first pull request for my project. I have no idea what an LLM might do. Worse, I know it might ace the first fifty pull requests and then make an absolutely mind-boggling mistake in…

> I can easily anticipate how an inexperienced engineer is going to mess up their first pull request for my project. Isn’t this just because you have seen a lot of PRs from inexperienced engineers? People learn LLM behavior over time, too.

I'm pretty sure that I've seen more LLM mistakes than coworker mistakes at this point and I'm nowhere closer to enlightenment.
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