Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 958 posts

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

#631

Post by sdevonoes »

eli wrote: post #514
allthetime wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A much more charitable framing: people who enjoy the process vs people who enjoy the result. (Though, granted, the results are a lot better if you craft it by hand)

But business people always cared only about thr result. My PM (who speaks like a salesman) only cares about the results. My “head of” same. My ceo same. The only ones who ever cared about the process and quality were us the engineers… if we don’t have that care, well, to hell with everything

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

#632

Post by sdevonoes »

Finbel wrote: post #533
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?

One difference is: to use a top notch compiler/assembler you don’t need to pay. They are open source and have a lot of support. To use the latest and greatest models (bc no one around likes to use non sota ones) you need to pay a premium price.

Multibillion dollars companies are now the gateway for every line of code you need to write. That’s dystopian. It sucks

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

#633

Post by cultofmetatron »

2 days ago, we updated a stripe library which broke everything. With AI, I was able to one shot wrapping all of the calls into a shared service, patched the broken api contract across the entire app and got our signup and payment flows working again. solid day and a half of work. this would have taken a days of back and forth debugging previously. AI is not a panacea for everything but its doign valuable work right now.

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

#634

Post by sdevonoes »

eddieroger wrote: post #416
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…

> If I know the answer to all these questions, wiring it together takes me LESS time than passing it to Claude Code. That's just not true, and if it is in your case, then you're not great at writing prompts yet. > Take the todo_items table in Postgres and build a Micronaut API based around it. The base URL should be /v1/todo_items. You can connect to Postgres with pguser:pgpass@1.2.3.4 That's about all it takes these…

I have worked with people like you. Worst colleagues ever.

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

#635

Post by bamboozled »

andy_ppp wrote: post #366

Honestly, I think the need for devs is total copium, the progress made in two years is astounding and in two years time they will be better at programming than 99% of programmers. It’s incredible what they can do now. No it’s not perfect but imagine where we’ll be in 5 or 10 years.

All of those out of work radiologists would agree \s

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

#636

Post by bamboozled »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #633

2 days ago, we updated a stripe library which broke everything. With AI, I was able to one shot wrapping all of the calls into a shared service, patched the broken api contract across the entire app and got our signup and payment flows working again. solid day and a half of work. this would have taken a days of back and forth debugging previously. AI is not a panacea for everything but its doign valuable work right n…

What does this have to do with the article?

I'd say if you're a semi-competent developer, as probably many people reading the article and commenting already are, this comment adds nothing new to the discussion and would already be a very vanilla usage example of "AI".

I think the point is that while you can "do things" like extracting the stripe integrations out into their own service in ten minutes, you're not stepping into other problems, such as how do you handle failures, how do you scale the stripe service, how do you structure all your other micro services so they can communicate in a coherent way, basically you're speed running yourself into harder decisions when using AI.

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

#637

Post by 0xpgm »

Finbel wrote: post #533
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?

However, curious programmers who develop in high level languages will dabble with assembly maybe for fun, and will be much better off for it than those who treat parts of the stack like a black box never to be opened.

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

#638

Post by jesterson »

zx8080 wrote: post #482
jesterson wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"

Oh managers are not the biggest evil here. At least they know basics.

Now we have influx of people with not a single shred of technical knowledge thinking they can create something.

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

#639

Post by anygivnthursday »

eli wrote: post #514
allthetime wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A much more charitable framing: people who enjoy the process vs people who enjoy the result. (Though, granted, the results are a lot better if you craft it by hand)

> enjoy the process

This means different things to different people, lot of people enjoy the process of engineering solutions with LLM agents, build out tailored skilled, custom approaches that make up their own flavour "agentic" workflow. There are also people who find joy in Javascript that other people cannot understand why. And other people again love system languages or even tinkering with assembly etc.

What I wanted to say is that LLM use does not automatically mean people just want to get results faster, there are still nerds enjoying the process of working with these new tools.

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

#640

Post by human305893 »

dodu_ wrote: post #608
lmeyerov wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, i…

1. If what you're replying to was a thing, wouldn't there be a open source project where I could see this in action? or Some sort of example I could watch on youtube somewhere. 2. The people that talk like this in my company, spin up new projects all the time and then just get to hand them off for other teams to clean up the mess and decode what the heck is going on.
Post reply on HN