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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

#531

Post by bulbar »

notnullorvoid wrote: post #528
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…

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 suffic…

Giving a precise description of what the computer is supposed to do is exactly what programming is.

The more specific your requirements the closer you get to natural language not being useful anymore.

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

#532

Post by bulbar »

hrldcpr wrote: post #47
cortesoft wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting AI coding was as good 20 years ago as it is today?

I think they're being sarcastic, saying that rewrites from scratch have rarely worked well (whether done by AI or humans).

Exactly. Sorry for not being explicit about it. I thought it was clear enough, because 'this code is crap, let's just rewrite the whole thing, doesn't look to hard' is kind of famous for being a bad idea most of the time since forever.

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

#533

Post by Finbel »

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…

>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?

I do not know the inns and out of the assembly layer my high level code end up as. It's not because I don't like to learn, it's because I genuinely don't need to. At a certain level of AI performance, how will this be any different?

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

#534

Post by steventhedev »

xantronix wrote: post #117
zarzavat wrote: post #24

Perhaps I've missed a few weeks worth of progress, but I don't think that AIs have become more trustworthy, the errors are just more subtle. If the code doesn't compile, that's easy to spot. If the code compiles but doesn't work, that's still somewhat easy to spot. If the code compiles and works, but it does the wrong thing in some edge case, or has a security vulnerability, or introduces tech debt or dubious archite…

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,…

The dirty secret if you work inside BigCorp and look around at the projects they're showcasing:

1. They're low stakes to get wrong.

2. The most common is MCPs or similar ai-tooling.

3. Making them look good takes time and effort still. It's a multiplier, not a replacement.

4. Quality and maintainability require investment. I had to restart an agentic project several times because it painted itself into a corner.

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

#535

Post by notnullorvoid »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #71
etothet wrote: post #33

Vibe Coding (and LLMs) did not create undisciplined engineering organizations or engineers. They exposed and accelerated them. Plenty of engineers have loose (or no!) standards and practices over how they write coee. Similarly, plenty of engineering teams have weak and loose standards over how code gets pushed to production. This concept isn't new, it's just a lot easier for individuals and teams who have never reall…

Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good. I personally don’t know any colleagues who were good engineers just because they wrote code faster. The best engineers I know were ones who drew on experience and careful consideration and shared critical insights with their team that steered the direction of the system positively. > Claude, engineer a system for me, but do it good. Thanks!

> Bad engineers continue being bad, good engineers continue being good.

Unfortunately I have seen some really good software engineering peers regress into bad engineers through a increasing reliance on AI.

Conversely some very bad engineers (undeserving of the title) have been producing better outputs than I ever expected possible of them.

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

#536

Post by Daishiman »

xantronix wrote: post #459
empthought wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Engineers that didn't move past src.v35.final.zip version control don't really have jobs today, either.

There is an absolute embarrassment of modern tooling in other categories I have no problem whatsoever embracing. I'm not a holdout for being stuck in my ways. Maybe I value things other than expediency at massive cost. Maybe I speak just as well to computers as I do to humans. I'm sure I will have no problem whatsoever remaining in the employ of a firm that trusts me to make products and tooling that still push the e…

There is no massive cost. For 80% of the brute work that needs to be done day in and day out LLMs provide code as good as a senior engineer provided you have sufficient competency in steering the model, but done at breakneck pace.

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

#537

Post by kyykky »

bulbar wrote: post #531
notnullorvoid wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suffic…

Giving a precise description of what the computer is supposed to do is exactly what programming is. The more specific your requirements the closer you get to natural language not being useful anymore.

I code mostly in APL and J. It’s much faster to type the code than explain everything to AI.

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

#538

Post by kyykky »

justech wrote: post #512
rimmontrieu wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don’t think it’s going to burst like how other people expect. The technology is already out there, when it loses steam people aren’t suddenly going to stop using it. I predit it’ll be more like the dot come crash where companies that can survive the downturn come out dominant.

It ends like this: all codebases become unmaintainable spaghetti after agentic AI spends years on it. Then after every agent in existence will spend minimum 24 hours reading the codebase to add a simple feature, the software is abandoned.

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

#539

Post by Daishiman »

svieira wrote: post #448
Daishiman wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Faster feature development, more strategic thinking in how to keep the dev pipeline full, doing braindead mechanical improvements that pay off tech debt that would have otherwise not have management sign-off to justify, writing GUI-based tools for support teams that previously had to scour reams of shell scripts, spending more time on refining specifications and estimations, writing throwaway concepts of different design ideas in order to have better architetuce discussions based on real code instead of pseudocode, clearing out the backlog of bugs that used to be terribly annoying to reproduce and that now I can just throw brute compute for resolving.
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