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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

#611

Post by adastra22 »

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…

LLMs are accelerants. They elevate great engineers to ever more dizzying heights of productivity. They also multiply massively the sloppy output of shit engineers.

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

#612

Post by necovek »

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.

This is an unpopular take, but when I was in undergrad maths in an old-school two-semester courses with one exam (exercises + oral) to cover it at the end, I was able to get to 60-80% score on exercises when I did just theory as prep.

I couldn't get exercises done where there were tricks/shortcuts which are learned by doing a lot of exercises, but for many, these are still the same tricks/shortcuts used in proofs.

This was indeed rare among students, but let's not discount that there are people who _can_ learn from well systemized material and then apply that in practice. Everyone does this to an extent or everyone would have to learn from the basics.

The problem with SW design is that it is not well systemized, and we still have at least two strong opposing currents (agile/iterative vs waterfall/pre-designed).

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

#613

Post by dodu_ »

eric_cc wrote: post #406
jwpapi wrote: post #373

> I know full well that if you ask Claude Code to build a JSON API endpoint that runs a SQL query and outputs the results as JSON, it’s just going to do it right. It’s not going to mess that up. You have it add automated tests, you have it add documentation, you know it’s going to be good. I feel like this is just not true. An JSON API endpoint also needs several decisions made. - How should the endpoint be named - W…

You can also just talk it out loud to Claude while you’re on a walk getting some sunshine. Done.

I'd rather just be an actual schizophrenic at that point. It seems like less of a mental illness.

Just be outside and present.

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

#614

Post by threethirtytwo »

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…

I don't believe this. Either you're lying, or you just haven't caught on with how to use Agentic AI.

Everything I do to interact with my computer is through an agent now.

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

#615

Post by necovek »

timschmidt wrote: post #569
necovek wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to have missed OP's point: some things are only encoded in our brains when you are sufficiently experienced. Translating that into code can happen directly by you, or into prompt iterations that need to result in the same/similar coded representation. In other words, when it matters how something works and it is full of intricate details, you do not need to specify it, you just do it (eg. as an example which…

I think there's a level above that where the words to describe such structure are familiar and readily available and hey guess what? The model understands those too. Just about every pattern has a name. Or a shape. Or an analog or metaphor in other languages or codebases. All work as descriptors.

This presumes that most of this stays encoded as words in our brains: the effort to translate some of these into words might be similar to translating it into code (still words, just very precise).

It's like talking legalese vs plain English; or formal logic vs English. Some people have the formal stuff come more naturally, and then spitting code out is not a burden.

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

#616

Post by stephenr »

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…

> LLMs get more intelligent

The Spicy Autocomplete koolaid club is out in force today I see.

We clearly have different ideas of what the word "intelligent" means.

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

#617

Post by aryehof »

_pdp_ wrote: post #553

About two years ago I was using the term "agentic engineer" to describe someone who builds AI agents - not a vibe coder. Agentic Engineer does not make much sense to be applied to a developer. It is weird and confusing to call a web designer that uses AI assisted coding tools "agentic engineer".

Vanity titles never make much sense, and now even more people can call themselves “engineers”. I was always at a loss why many weren’t calling themselves “web engineers”. Hey Mom, I used Claude Code today at work so I’m an Agentic Engineer!

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

#618

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#619

Post by stephenr »

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…

> successfully adopting agentic engineering practices

What's your definition of "successfully"?

More LOC committed per day is probably the only one that's guaranteed when you let spicy autocomplete take the wheel.

I don't think it's at all possible to reason about the other more meaningful metrics in software development, because we simply don't have the context of what each human is working on, and as with the WYSIWYG fad of 3 decades ago, "success" is generally self-reported, by people who don't know what they don't know, and thus they don't know what spicy autocomplete is getting woefully wrong.

"But it {compiles,runs,etc}" isn't a meaningful metric when a large portion of the code in question is dynamic/loosely typed in a non-compiled language (JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc).

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

#620

Post by mohsen1 »

Insanity wrote: post #239
mohsen1 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, unless there is a concrete way of proving work is correct you can't rely on AI coding. tsz has super strict tests around correctness, performance and architectural boundaries

If I understood you correctly, I think I'm less extreme than that. Most code written by humans is also not provably correct. But I'm assuming you mean provably correct like Lean: https://lean-lang.org/ , and not just "passes tests". If you mean 'passes tests', that can be tackled by AI. Although AI writing its own tests and then implementing its own code is definitely not a foolproof strategy.

More or less. The tsz solver is pure enough (it doesn't know about the AST) that it might be possible to formally validate it. But in my case I am lucky with tsc baseline. Anything that produces different output than tsc is a bug
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