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

721–730 of 958 posts

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

#721

Post by jmull »

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…

They probably mean faster to a higher-level goal rather than SLOC. Typing speed and SLOC have never been that useful for measuring productivity.

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

#722

Post by rotis »

coldtea wrote: post #689
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.

Caring about what? I could slap an application and say I vibe coded it or I could equally claim I agentically engineered it. No one could tell the difference(if there is any) without seeing the code. The only thing you could say I used an LLM. And that is what is happening. Most of the code that is "engineered" we don't get to see. So who know what is really going on there and what is the actual result?

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

#723

Post by threethirtytwo »

hatefulheart wrote: post #627
threethirtytwo wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't believe this. Either you're lying, or you just haven't caught on how to use a computer. Everything I do to interact with my computer is still the same. See how boring you are?

Ok sorry about that. I seriously don't believe him. The Agent is so fast there's literally no way you can be faster.

Telling the agent your high level plan that you are extremely familiar with and then having the agent execute on 2000 lines of code is FASTER then having you execute on that 2000 lines of code. There is no reality where that can be physically beaten by even someone who's typing really quickly with zero pause. Physically impossible.

Less boring or not? Another way to put it... although my answer is boring, I think I'm right. He is either a liar or like many other people lacks skill in using AI... because the transition to AI is happening so fast... not many people are fully utilizing AI to it's maximum potential. Many still use IDEs, many still interact with terminal. Many people still don't use it to configure infrastructure, do database administration, deploy code... etc.

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

#724

Post by sdevonoes »

simonw wrote: post #623
mjr00 wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenClaw is definitely not a "5 years" project pre-AI though. That was more like a month of greenfield work compressed into a weekend -- which is still really impressive, don't get me wrong! -- but I think the point is we're not seeing mature , legacy codebases get outcompeted by new, agile, AI-driven codebases; we're seeing greenfield projects get spun up faster. Which, again, is still impressive and valuable. If ag…

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

Didn’t we learn anything from the past? Using loc or number of commits or github stars to measure success or productivity is so backwards. It seems everyone on the AI wagon is either young (and so they don’t know our history) or simply forgot about all the good practices in software engineering

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

#725

Post by 16bitvoid »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #630
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.

You are probably talking about people who just crunch out some half baked solutions for the sake of getting somewhere. But there are other nerds who care, just not about the code quality, but about conversion, testing out business ideas quickly, getting to know their customers better. There are nerds who care about business strategy. There are nerds who care about accounting principles and clean financial reporting.…

They very clearly weren't talking about nerds in general but rather nerds who care about software.

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

#726

Post by MrScruff »

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…

Is your argument that there is no imaginable situation where someone who was competent at software development could find use for a semi-automated tool for writing software?

That would imply that either the person in question has infinite time, or has access to all software that could ever be of utility to them, which seems unlikely.

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

#727

Post by sdevonoes »

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".

It isn’t man. Anyone can easily split a single good commit into 10 just to inflate the numbers. C’mon, this is 101 git

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

#728

Post by sdevonoes »

Daishiman wrote: post #539
svieira wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did you use to fill the time you aren't doing feature development in with? Or are you all now working 20 hour work weeks?

Faster feature development, more strategic thinking in how to keep the dev pipeline full, doing braindead mechanical improvements that pay off tech debt that would have otherwise not have management sign-off to justify, writing GUI-based tools for support teams that previously had to scour reams of shell scripts, spending more time on refining specifications and estimations, writing throwaway concepts of different de…

Sounds awful. Just filling the time with worthless stuff. You are basically a liability. Wouldn’t like to have you in my team. Less is more (nowadays more than ever)

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

#729

Post by MrScruff »

ehnto wrote: post #622
enraged_camel wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there's some ambiguity in the discussion around what people mean when they say "good code". Good code for a business is robust code, that's functionally correct, efficient where it needs to be and does not cost too much. I believe most developers who care about good code are trying to articulate this, they care about a strong system that delivers well, which comes from good architecture. LLMs actually deliver…

I think the other aspect to this which you allude to at the end is that all of these arguments start with the assumption that all human software engineers produce high quality code that meets the requirements, but obviously that’s very much not the case in the real world. After all, 80-90% of drivers rate themselves as above average.

If one compares a single competent software engineer directing a number of agents against a random group of engineers (not necessarily working at FAANG or a YC startup), then those quality arguments are going to be significantly less compelling.

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

#730

Post by lukan »

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…

Yes, there are still many areas where skilled humans are faster than AI (meaning faster coding yourself, than providing so much context and guidance that the AI can do it on its "own").

But in general the statement is really not true anymore, generic projects/problems have a pretty good chance that the AI can one shot a working solution from a lazily typed vague prompt.

Post reply on HN