Totally agree. The sales pitch is that anyone can use this stuff, but good output is only obtained via thorough understanding.
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
481–490 of 958 posts
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#482The 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…
> 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. It's not just fun (i agree it is), but it is also essential for creation. What we have done with the 'AI' is to create a lot of ignorant morons who think they can create a lot of things without knowledge. This is not gonna end well.
> they can create a lot of things without knowledge. This is not gonna end well.
Who said "managers"
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also thoughtful code varies from that library that does that thing you need with an api so intuitive you don't even need autocomplete or docs (though it has docs) to the library that is extensible to every possible use case you will never need but missing the obious ones you do or at least makes them horribly unergonomic in the name of that extensibility and purity with regard to some random paradigm that is self evidently the best one.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#484Earlier 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…
The hardest thing about software engineering has always been that your intent often has to be decided on the fly once you get into complicated edge cases, weird-or-legacy-business requirements, or things that the spec literally has no answers for.
Letting the tool figure out your assumed intent on those things is a double-edged sword. Better than you never even thinking of them. But potentially either subtle broken contracts that test coverage missed (since nobody has full combinatoric coverage, or the patience to run it) or just further steps into a messy codebase that will cost ever-more tokens to change safely.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 think these are reasonable questions but it assumes that everything is actually a black box instead of being treated as such. Despite what the headlines say, these systems aren’t inscrutable. We know how these things work and can build around and within and change parameters and activation functions etc…and actually use experience and science and guidance. However those are not technical problems those are organiza…
I said the opposite of what your comment is replying to.
> 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.
There's no reason you can't make good use of them and learn how to do it more reliably and predictably, it's just chasing those gains through a human intelligence-like model because they use human language leads to more false starts and local maxima than trying to understand stand them as their owb systems.
I don't think it should even be a particularly contentious point: we humans think differently based on the languages we learn and grew up with, what would you expect when you remove the entire common denominator of a human brain?
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
but then how can the parent comment land? "you're just not prompting right"
I don't think it does. If I had to guess, the top comment was using an older version of AI or a local model which wouldn't be able to solve the JSON API task. A lot of AI skepticism comes from people who used it once a while back and decided not to keep up with the latest developments. If I only had experience with gpt-3.5 then I'd also assume what the original commenter said.
An experiment I'd love to do, but which isn't actually possible anymore, is run GPT 3.5 or the original 4 API release through a modern "agentic" harness for a task like this.
I think 3.5 would probably need more frequent intervention than a lot of harnesses give. But I bet 4 could do a simple JSON API one-shot with the right harness. Just back then I had to manually be the harness.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#487Earlier 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…
You don’t need to write code by hand to learn from iterations and experiments. I run more experiments and try out more different solutions than I ever could before, and that leads to better decisions. I still read all the code that gets shipped, and don’t want to give that up, but the idea that all craft and learning is lost when you don’t is a bit silly. The craft/learning just moves.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#488The 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…
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Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#489Earlier 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…
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.
To be fair, I don't know many humans who would write endpoints 2-50 from scratch either in that situation.
Time-wise, it's easy-mode vs easy-mode at that point.
The human is more likely to make copypasta errors, though!
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#490The 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…
AI is just revealing the two types of people in this line of work. Those who don’t actually like software and just do it because it’s lucrative, and the actual nerds who care.