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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

#681

Post by simonw »

mjr00 wrote: post #649
simonw wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work". https://tools.simonwillison.net/github-repo-stats?repo=OpenC...

> 41,964 commits is a lot more than "a month of greenfield work". I meant a month for the initial release, not current state. Regardless, much like lines of code, number of commits is not a good metric, not even as a proxy, for how much "work" was actually done. Quickly browsing there are plenty[0] of[1] really[2] small[3] commits[4]. Agentic coding naturally optimizes for small commits because that's what the proces…

That's why my original comment said:

> (Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time. It defined a new category of software.)

I brought up OpenClaw here because the challenge was:

> we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".

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

#683

Post by user34283 »

djhn wrote: post #558
user34283 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I don’t need to review carefully every line of code in my thumbnail generator and associated UI. My nonexistent backend isn’t going to be pwned if there is a bug in the thumbnail generation. After the QA testing on my device, a quick scroll through of the code is enough. Maybe prompt „are errors during thumbnail generation caught to prevent app crashes?“ if we‘re feeling extra cautious today. And j…

But a thumbnail generator is a 1 hour task at best if you’re on a solo greenfield project and it’ll still be a 6 week project at an enterprise, even with AI.

I would be impressed if you implement it in an hour with the following features:

- webview fallback with canvas capture for codecs not supported in the default player

- detecting blank frames and diff between thumbnails to maximize variety

- UI integration to visualize progress and pending thumbnails, batched updates to the gallery

- versioning scheme and backfill for missing/outdated thumbnail formats

Honestly, a day seems rather optimistic to me. Maybe if I was an expert for this platform and would have implemented a similar feature before, then I could hope to do it in a day.

If I had to handwrite it and estimate it for Scrum at work, I‘d budget a week.

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

#684

Post by timr »

simonw wrote: post #679
timr wrote: post #647

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? Commit count is right up there with lines of code as a classically dumb measurement of productivity.

Sure, but it's still a good counter to "a month of work".

No it isn't. There's basically no upper bound on the number of commits an LLM can generate. If the LLM takes 10,000 commits to do what a human would do in 10, then the comparison is meaningless.

I don't know anything about the code quality of OpenClaw, but telling me the number of commits tells me precisely nothing of use.

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

#686

Post by IanCal »

spoiler wrote: post #402
jwpapi wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like writing code to me is not slower than writing text? When I write code every character I type in my computer has less ambiguity than when I write it in human language? I also have the help of LSPs, Linters and Auto-completes.

It's not much to go on by, but I kinda feel ya. I think one exception I'd perhaps make is doing a large mechanic refactor. I find them incredibly daunting. So, I'll just ask AI for that. I mean it probably takes me a similar time to do, but it feels less daunting. I've been trying to get into agentic coding and there are non-refactoring instances where I might reac for it (like any time I need to work on something us…

I highly recommend looking into codemods for larger mechanical refactorings. I did things like converting large test suites from one testing library to another by having codex write a codemod to convert it as a first pass.

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

#687

Post by sevenzero »

>If you can go from producing 200 lines of code a day to 2,000 lines of code a day, what else breaks? The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code. And now it doesn’t.

How is producing more lines of code any good? How does quality assurance work with immeasurable code bloat? I want good software not slopware with 2000 different features. A good product does few things, but does these really well. There is no need to constantly add lines of code to a working product.

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

#688

Post by cbarte01 »

simonw wrote: post #279
atomicnumber3 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"many engineers have not yet tried things that became feasible over the last months" I have heard this statement every single day for 2 years and yet we still have no companies compressing 10 years into 1 year thus exploding past all the incumbents who don't "get it".

If you want an example of a project that condensed 5 years into 6 months and exploded past the competition I suggest looking at OpenClaw. The first line of code was written on November 25th. It achieved adoption in the "personal agents" space that far exceeded the other companies that had tried the same thing. (Whether or not you trust the quality of the software you can't deny the impact it had in such a short time.…

The condensation argument is totally true.... Strikes me though the other metric Id look at is how long code survives before being re-written. Feels like for that one a bit early to tell...

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

#689

Post by coldtea »

rotis wrote: post #665

> my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work. >I firmly staked out my belief that “vibe coding” is a very different beast from responsible use of AI to write code, which I’ve since started to call agentic engineering Disturbing? Really? I admit I don't do agentic and am going only by vibes, but for me agentic engineering is basically vibe coding in a aut…

>They both stem from the same LLM root and positioning them as significantly different is weird and unconvincing to me.

It's the difference between caring and not caring.

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

#690

Post by [deleted] »

draxil wrote: post #675
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…

Except it's often faster to make the change yourself than explain it to an AI.

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