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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

#521

Post by throwaway219450 »

jtr1 wrote: post #501
u8 wrote: 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…

I have been building an iOS app that I had kicking around in my head for years but never had time to build. I have been a frontend UX engineer for the better part of a decade and went through a handful of tutorials on Swift. The project definitely sits in this uncanny valley for me. I have test suites for every aspect of the app and have the agent using TDD to avoid cheating - this has gotten me pretty far without ha…

The agents always do the best work IMO if you already know exactly what you want, but are too lazy to implement it. I like having the agent mock up a working solution before reimplementing it.

To split the difference, I now try to hand code as much as I can from the beginning, leave TODO comments for the agent to mop up and I'll ask it to complete the issue with reference to the current diff. It reduces the surface for agents to make stupid assumptions. If I can get it done fast on my own, win for me, if the agent finds issues or there's logic that needs checking, also a win. This way you stay sharp, but you have access to an oracle if you get stuck and it costs you fewer tokens.

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

#524

Post by sarchertech »

vlunkr wrote: post #520
sarchertech wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you’re not great at writing prompts yet How do you reconcile that with your example prompt, which demonstrates no skill requirement whatsoever. It’s the first thing any developer would think of.

It’s simple but contains all the necessary info. You can say “build an endpoint to get user data” and it will absolutely do something, but it might be stupid, and when you compound 1000 stupid prompts like that you get spaghetti.

A programmer wouldn’t write a prompt like that. Notice the questions the OP talked about out answering first.

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

#525

Post by [deleted] »

leostarship wrote: post #507
ditchfieldcaleb wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you on everything you said here except: > when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only incre…

as i understood it he's referring to the overall time it takes to build a complete finished piece of software, accounting for the refactoring and bug fixes and all that. cause handn't you understood the tools you're using you would be running into roadblocks and that adds up

[deleted]

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

#526

Post by hyperadvanced »

seanw444 wrote: post #368
CharlieDigital wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The LLM obliges and writes a lot of useless tests. I have asked devs to delete several tests in the last day alone.

"I don't trust this giant statistical model to generate correct code, so to fix it, I'm going to have this giant statistical model generate more code to confirm that the other code it generated is correct." I swear I'm living through mass hysteria.

A lot of times the act of specifying test criteria prevents developers from accidentally vibe coding themselves into a bad implementation. You can then read the tests and verify that it does what you want it to. You can read the code!

I’m not saying that it’s all hunky dory, but you use AI for straight up test driven development to catch edge cases and correct sloppy implementations before they even get coded by your giant chaos machine.

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

#527

Post by leptons »

oompydoompy74 wrote: post #264
leptons wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I got to hallucinate at work, and just get a pat on the head for constantly doing the wrong thing.

The title for that is Director, VP, or CTO at any given large enterprise company.

People downvoted you, but I actually know a few of these people.

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

#528

Post by notnullorvoid »

ditchfieldcaleb wrote: post #495
u8 wrote: 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…

I agree with you on everything you said here except: > when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only incre…

Some of us do actually have intimate knowledge in certain areas where guidance of an AI takes longer than doing it yourself. It's not about typing speed, it's that when you know something really really well the solution/code is already known to you or the very act of thinking about the problem makes the solution known to you in full. When that happens it's less text to write that solution than it is to write a sufficient description of the solution to AI (not even counting the back and forth required of reviewing the AI output and correcting it).

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

#529

Post by Turskarama »

ditchfieldcaleb wrote: post #495
u8 wrote: 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…

I agree with you on everything you said here except: > when you know how the thing works and have that mental context, you will always be faster than an AI That's just plain false, honestly. No one can type at the speed AI can code, even factoring in the time you need to spend to properly write out the spec & design rules the AI needs to follow when implementing your app/feature/whatever. And that gap will only incre…

In my experience AI can write _something_ from scratch, but often edge cases won't be handled until I go through and read the results or test it. Usually when I'm writing by hand I will naturally find the majority of edge cases as I go. By the time I've read through the results and fixed said edge cases, I usually would have been faster just doing it myself.
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