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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

#651

Post by aquariusDue »

stephenr wrote: post #621
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.

I've posited for a while now that the people who find spicy autocomplete to be exciting are the people who can't really do what it does. I played with Image Playground last year some time. It was really fun. You know why? I can't draw, and I can't paint, to save my life. It's letting me do something I can't do well/at all on my own. Using an LLM to do something I can do, with the caveat that it's pretty mediocre at t…

Initially I wanted to write more but I can boil it down to taste and context mismatch. By that I mean some people see LLM output as tasteless or kitsch (which I ascribe to generally) and another set of people (though sometimes overlapping more often than not) hold disdain or at the very least look funny at heavy LLM users like gym-goers would look at someone in the middle of the gym loudly suggesting using a dolly or forklift instead of barbell training.

So yeah, I guess the value of doodles has shot up simply because of optics.

Somewhere else in this comment section someone tried to broaden the definition of nerd so much so that pretty much anybody who is a consummate professional is also a nerd. The hill I will die on is that people don't actually dislike all this new AI stuff but more so the attitude of people heavily invested in it.

And to add another data point regarding your hill my drawing/painting moment was NLP stuff. Now if I want to do (rudimentary) sentiment analysis or keyword extraction I can lean on a local LLM. Yet I don't go around yelling Snowball (I think?) is obsolete.

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

#652

Post by TeriyakiBomb »

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…

Plenty of cars can get off the line faster than an F1 car. But around a track, an F1 is by far the fastest in the world.

Going fast isn’t the difficult bit.

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

#653

Post by Kiro »

Turskarama wrote: post #529
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…

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.

My experience is the opposite: AI takes too many edge cases into account and guard against even the most unlikely thing. The upside is that it often handles edge cases that I either didn't think about or was too lazy to implement.

I can with full confidence say that the code AI writes is more robust and safe than if I would have done it myself. The code definitely becomes more bloated though.

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

#654

Post by torginus »

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.

Imo the biggest issue with these no-code architects has been that you could become one without ever having coded at any noteworthy level of skill (which meant most of them were like this).

In my experience, in a lot of organizations, a lot of people either lacked the ability or the willingness to achieve any level of technical competence.

Many of these people played the management game, and even if they started out as devs (very mediocre ones at best), they quickly transitioned out from the trenches and started producing vague technical guidance that usually did nothing to address the problems at hand, but could be endlessly recycled to any scenario.

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

#656

Post by Kiro »

utopiah wrote: post #607
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 Don't we already have a weekly post nowadays explaining, again, that typing isn't the bottleneck?

Which is still false and not serious. It's one of the dumbest rationalizations I've seen. AI has many flaws but pretending that it's useless because of that is not it.

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

#657

Post by tempaccount5050 »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #574
MikeNotThePope wrote: post #564

The more I use AI, the more I find it’s great for anything trivial and uninspired. Need help with some predictable glue code? AI. Need help with something insightful and new to the world? Not AI. Need help with an important task that’s been done a 1000 times? AI with scrutiny. Need to invent something new to the world and core to your business? Probably not AI.

I'm struggling to imagine the sort of person who struggles with predictable glue code that I would trust with anything more important than that, with or without AI...

It's not a struggle for me to walk 15 miles to work every day, I could easily do it. It's just makes no sense when I have a car.

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

#660

Post by NikolaosC »

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…

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