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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

#751

Post by pepperoni_pizza »

stephenr wrote: post #619
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…

> 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 WYSIW…

Also, if your boss tells you "we're AI company now, you will use AI or be fired" then of course you will use AI and claim it is productive.

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

#752

Post by ianm218 »

ofrzeta wrote: post #546

"I want professionally managed software companies to use AI coding assistance to make more/better/cheaper software products that they sell to me for money.” (Simon Willison herein quotes Matthew Yglesias) - this is such a naive and sloppy take. What do you want? "better software"? not going to happen. "cheaper software"? not going to happen either. "more software"? for sure, but is it really what you want? If I hire…

I definitely want more, higher quality software, maybe even 10X more. Even simple things like a personal assistant that can help manage my social life better don't really exist yet, nevermind that I want a medical team doing research on my behalf/ optimizing my insurance. Or a software team in the background building bespoke software for all my hobbies etc.

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

#753

Post by rotis »

coldtea wrote: post #741
rotis wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. Caring about the result, whether one "can tell the difference" or not.

Got it. Vibe coding is all about the end result, damned be the way we got there. So I assume agentic engineering must be the opposite here? Don't care what we will cook. If I get a calculator while asking for integrator that is the true agentic engineering.

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

#754

Post by jimbokun »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #590
jimbokun wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why would the lines in the 2000 case be easier to review per line?

Which of these programs is easier to review {x{x,sum -2#x}/0 1} or def f(n): if n They're both the same program

Good question.

But it is orthogonal to the question of evaluating 2000 lines of AI code vs 200 lines of human written code. Either the human or the AI could produce idiomatic code for either language, given sufficient training data in the AI’s corpus for the language.

My guess is that the first one is much quicker to review, for a human equally fluent in both languages.

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

#755

Post by matt_kantor »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #723
hatefulheart wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why are you starting the clock at the time when you already have a "high level plan that you are extremely familiar with"? I think it's fairer to start from "I received a bug report/feature request" or similar.

Also, haven't you ever had a situation where the prompt you started with ends up being longer than the final code diff? Perhaps a subtle bug that's hard to describe/trigger, but ended up having a simple root cause like an off-by-one error?

Also also, coding agents are infamous for generating way more code than is strictly necessary. The 2000 lines of code that the agent generated may well have been only 200 lines had you written it yourself.

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

#756

Post by [deleted] »

larodi wrote: post #695
Zecc wrote: post #691

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're good at SQL, or SQL-like languages like Linq, it might be more efficient precisely writing a reasonably complex query than trying to explain it in detail to an AI.

I am very good at SQL, I worked half my life with SQL and teached it and know all kinds of SQL flavour. But good luck getting ahead of AI on a complex query with recursive CTEs, left outers, 625-column tables that change semantics conditional to certain prop, and then some obscure Oracle package APIs. No way U beat an LLM on this, even on trivial ones. LLMs are better at that since at least 2024, if you haven't notic…

[deleted]

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

#757

Post by therealpygon »

gchamonlive wrote: post #732
latexr wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, when did we stop liking to learn? I suspect it happened when we achieved a level of such constant stimulation (there is a pocket computer always on us with infinite effortless distraction) that we’re never bored and never engage the default mode network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8 When you’re bored, your mind goes to places it wouldn’t otherw…

> it happened when we achieved a level of such constant stimulation (...) that we’re never bored and never engage the default mode network. I don't know... I don't disagree, but I think this has been repeated so much that I believe everyone, at least everyone that is actively participating in HN discussions is aware of this. So if we are aware of this and we consciously choose to keep engaging in dopaminergic activit…

Or at least, aware that this argument continues to be made with tenuous evidence and anecdotes. And yet, people are being more productive (actually productive) with AI. Release schedules are increasing, bugs are getting fixed faster, security issues identified and patched sooner, so on and so forth.

I’m not denying (at all) that unused skills languish. I take issue with AI being characterized as a magic eraser that mystically makes people forget what they have already learned. I’ve just done a study and concluded that dogs gets dumber when I throw a ball. What’s my evidence? They stop staring at me to chase it. The ball definitely made them forget who I was, so we shouldn’t allow dogs to have balls anymore.

Can AI make developers lazy in new ways? Of course! Why wouldn’t it? I don’t write things in ASM because I can be “lazy” and write 50x more useful instructions with a few lines of a modern language. I doubt I’d be able to write working ASM anymore without a serious refresher. Did newer languages erase my memory of ASM and make me “lazy”, or did my efforts evolve to make use of the newest technology regardless of “lost” skills?

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

#758

Post by galangalalgol »

cpursley wrote: post #750
stephenr wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are letting your LLM look at StackOverflow, you are doing it wrong So you've evaluated all the sources that the model was trained on initially have you? How long did that take you? > I'm shipping quality software and features to my customers at a pace I haven't been able to before. I'm sorry are you agreeing with me or not? It sounds like you're agreeing with me.

I’m just saying that you can’t just let it rip based on its training alone, it needs to be grounded and harnessed in stack specific tooling.

I'd be more general and say it needs verification to guide it, and narrowed scope so it doesn't wander off. How those get provided can vary. While I can do what I'm asking it to do, and have so many times that I don't want to anymore, I can't do it as fast as it can. But as someone said, it is stupid really fast. The bottleneck is now me slowing down this intern who thinks fast by stopping it to redirect it when it does bad things. The more pre prompting and context and verification tools I give it the less I have to do that, so the faster it goes. Then I get to solve the parts of the problem I haven't done until its boring.

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

#759

Post by latexr »

gchamonlive wrote: post #732
latexr wrote: post #707

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, when did we stop liking to learn? I suspect it happened when we achieved a level of such constant stimulation (there is a pocket computer always on us with infinite effortless distraction) that we’re never bored and never engage the default mode network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orQKfIXMiA8 When you’re bored, your mind goes to places it wouldn’t otherw…

> it happened when we achieved a level of such constant stimulation (...) that we’re never bored and never engage the default mode network. I don't know... I don't disagree, but I think this has been repeated so much that I believe everyone, at least everyone that is actively participating in HN discussions is aware of this. So if we are aware of this and we consciously choose to keep engaging in dopaminergic activit…

> I think this has been repeated so much that I believe everyone, at least everyone that is actively participating in HN discussions is aware of this.

I promise you that is incorrect. People who actively participate on HN are a group more diverse than is often given credit, and I strongly believe there is nothing “everyone knows” here.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Just nine days ago, someone on HN was vaguely aware of the idea but did not know it’s called the default mode network. How many more aren’t even aware of the idea?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926043

Not knowing the name means you’re not aware of all the details, intricacies, studies and ideas pertaining to it.

Finally, even if everyone knew about it that would still not be reason to not talk about it. Talking and doing something repeatedly is how you create habits and change behaviour. Same way you should still call out when someone does something bad even if “everyone knows they do it”.

> I think it starts to become a choice. (…) we can only blame ourselves for perpetuating it.

That is called blaming the victim. There are multiple billion dollar corporations and industries actively working to get you addicted, bombarding you from every side. It’s not a simple choice of “I’m not going to engage”, rather you have to actively disengage from what’s thrown in your face all the time. It’s exhausting. You’re falling into their trap and repeating the words they want you to. It’s like a supermarket which offers 99% junk and only a tiny section of always the same selection for healthy eating (not a hypothetical, I have several like that nearby) then blaming buyers for not eating more healthily. It’s not a fair choice if you’re constantly pushing and finding ways to trick people to in one specific direction.

And again, not everyone is aware of what is happening. Most people aren’t. And even those who are (which, again, is not even everyone on HN) aren’t immune.

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

#760

Post by orphea »

zuzululu wrote: post #167
orphea wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By then AI would be good enough to clean them all up... [citation needed] To make my comment more on-topic: why do you think this is going to be the case? What newer LLMs will be trained on?

well you are assuming that there's not going to be any new progress and that we are going to be stuck with whatever LLM version we have currently

No. I assume that

* we're already close to the ceiling of LLM capabilities: LLM providers probably already consumed everything they could. Plus there have been no large improvements for a while, only small and incremental. I believe Mythos-too-dangerous-to-release is a marketing bullshit, until proved otherwise.

* people generate overengineered slop at light speeds. If that is the training base for future models, I doubt they're going to improve significantly, rather quality is going to stagnate at best.

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