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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

#601

Post by jasonfarnon »

larodi wrote: post #565
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…

Care to explain which particular intimate knowledge allowed you in the last 6-9 months to be faster than AI in certain area? Honestly, I'm still faster than AI cooking scrambled eggs, but definitely not faster than neither AI (or compiler) in translating stuff into code.

I interpret "faster than AI" to include writing the prompt. For me (scientific computing) it is more often than not faster to write out a simulation or design in a language I know inside out like fortran or mathematica than explicate the requirements to an LLM to request the code. Obviously if someone wrote out a prompt to me and the LLM it would be way faster, but I don't think that's what the commenter had in mind.

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

#603

Post by enraged_camel »

allthetime wrote: post #490
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…

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.

I care about solving problems for and delivering value to my users. The software is simply a means to that end. It needs to work well, but that does not mean every line of code requires an artisanal touch and high attention to detail.

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

#604

Post by zxspectrumk48 »

lumost wrote: post #321
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…

Honestly, the problem is one of BS detection. Lead engineer says something is not workable? Pm overrides saying that Claude code could do it. Problems found months later at launch and now the engineers are on the hook. New junior onboardee declares that their new vision is the best and gets management onto it cuz it’s trendy -> broken app. It’s made collaboration nearly unbearable as you are beholden to the person wi…

> It’s made collaboration nearly unbearable as you are beholden to the person with the lowest standards.

Exactly right.

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

#605

Post by noosphr »

satvikpendem wrote: post #552
kyykky wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The exceptions that prove the rule. When your programming language is built up of singular Unicode characters with specific meanings, of course that's faster than typing out in English what you want. What do you use them for? For most AI users it's usually CRUD and I've never seen a web server or frontend in APL like languages.

The exception is the rule.

The reason why programming is hard is because most languages force you to use a hammer when you need a screw driver. LLMs are very good at misusing hammers and most people find them useful for that reason.

If you use a sane dsl instead the natural language description of a problem is always more complex and much longer than the equivalent description in a dsl. It's also usually wrong to boot.

This is what algebra used to look like before variables: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes%27s_cattle_problem#...

I don't think you will find anyone who can do better than an LLM at one shotting the prose version of the problem. Both will of course be wrong.

But I also don't think you will find an LLM that can solve the problem faster than a human with Prolog when you have to use the prose description of the problem.

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

#606

Post by sothatsit »

ori_b wrote: post #545
sothatsit wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How much calculus do you think you could pick up skimming a textbook without doing exercises? We mocked these "architects" from experience. We knew that if you weren't feeling the friction yourself, you wouldn't learn enough to do good design. Maybe you don't care about engineering great systems. Most companies don't. It's good for profit. This isn't new, though AI enables less care.

The entire mistake you are making is comparing using AI to skimming textbooks, or taking shortcuts. Your entire premise is wrong.

People who care about craft will care about the quality of what they produce whether they use AI or not.

The code I ship now is better tested and better thought through now than before I used AI because I can do a lot more. That extra time goes into additional experiments, jumping down more rabbit holes, and trying out ideas I previously couldn’t due to time constraints. It’s freeing to be able to spend more time to improve quality because the ROI on time spent experimenting has gone up dramatically.

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

#607

Post by utopiah »

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…

> No one can type at the speed AI can code

Don't we already have a weekly post nowadays explaining, again, that typing isn't the bottleneck?

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

#608

Post by dodu_ »

lmeyerov wrote: post #548
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…

Maybe a failure to automate? The volume of people successfully adopting agentic engineering practices suggests this stuff isn't rocket science, but it is a learned skill and takes setup. A year later into heavy AI coding, my experience is what you're describing should aid in being able to run 5+ agents simultaneously on a project because you know what you're doing, you set it up right, and you know how to tell agents…

Maybe you're the exception and are actually doing it right and actually getting good results, but every time I have heard this, it has been an ignorance-is-bliss scenario where the person saying it is generating massive amounts of code that they don't understand, not because they're incapable but because they don't care to, and immediately wiping their hands of it afterward.

To give an example of where I hear this, it is indistinguishable from the things I hear from my coworkers: "You just need the right setup!" (IMO the actual difference is I need to turn off the part of my brain that cares about what the code actually does or considers edge cases at all) What I actually see, in practice, are constant bugs where nobody ever actually addresses the root cause, and instead just paves over it with a new Claude mass-edit that inevitably introduces another bug where we'll have to repeat the same process when we run into another production issue.

We end up making no actual progress, but boy do we close tickets, push PRs, and move fast and oh man do we break things. We're just doing it all in-place. But at least we're sucking ourselves off for how fast we're moving and how cutting edge we are, I guess.

I dunno, maybe I'm doing it wrong, maybe my team is all doing it wrong. But like I said the things they say are indistinguishable from the common HN comment that insists how this stuff is jet fuel for them, and I see the actual results, not just the volume of output, and there's no way we're occupying the same reality.

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

#609

Post by Aerolfos »

charcircuit wrote: post #547
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…

>No one can type at the speed AI can code You can definitely be faster than frontier models. The number of tokens per second is not that high and they require a lot of tokens for thinking and navigating things.

Especially if you use auto-complete AI, ironically. You type a few characters, the line fills out in less than a second, as opposed to a reasoning model that takes maybe a second per 2-3 lines it writes out.

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

#610

Post by techpression »

andai wrote: post #581
techpression wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes for all professions really, people who do it for work and people who care. Apply to any profession, plumbers, doctors, carpenters, cleaners, etc etc. Most of us have experienced both types and I haven’t heard of anyone preferring the ”do it for work” over the ones who care. And like those other professions, in software we accept the worse of the two because finding people who care is both time consuming and o…

>in software we accept the worse of the two and the whole world suffers for it.

No disagreement from me
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