Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like • Hacker News Board

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

#821

Post by notnullorvoid » Thu, May 07, 2026, 2:48 PM UTC

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…

Again it's not about typing speed. High level plans simply don't work very well, especially for big tasks where the optimal solution actually would take 2k lines. Unless you are building something that is extremely generic, AI coming up with the optimal solution rarely ever happens.

> He is either a liar or like many other people lacks skill in using AI

Not a liar, and I'm sorry to say, but AI really doesn't take much skill to use. People who say such statements give me the impression that their ceiling for skills is quite low.

Their are areas I do and will continue to use AI and it works well enough. Giving me prototypes for projects I don't have a lot of knowledge about is one thing. But I use those prototypes to learn.

> configure infrastructure

I make templates I can copy and tweak to do this faster than it takes to tell an agent what to do.

> database administration

Don't do that... Sure get it to write you some SQL to update a table, but don't give it DB admin access for fucks sake.

> deploy code

Tell me, how is your agent able to deploy code more effectively than hitting merge on a PR? Or do you simply mean setting up CI/CD for you? That's usually a set and forget thing that doesn't take much time, so I'd rather do it myself.

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

#822

Post by atomicnumber3 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 2:57 PM UTC

sdevonoes wrote: post #724

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...

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

That latter bit is my experience. As soon as AI enters the equation, we have to immediately ignore everything we ever learned and just type text into the prompt box, or you're not doing it right.

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

#823

Post by sothatsit » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

ori_b wrote: post #820

sothatsit wrote: post #606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire mistake you are making is comparing using AI to skimming textbooks, or taking shortcuts. Your entire premise is wrong. People who care about craft will care about the quality of what they produce whether they use AI or not. The code I ship now is better tested and better thought through now than before I used AI because I can do a lot more. That extra time goes into additional experiments, jumping down mor…

You can keep telling yourself that. I have seen the results from others making the same arguments. The result is invariably trash.

Well you have obviously already made up your mind, so have fun with your confirmation bias. We'll all be over here having a good time, getting more work done. Feel free to come over when you put down your grudge.

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

#824

Post by lmeyerov » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:03 PM UTC

human305893 wrote: post #640

dodu_ wrote: post #608

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1. Probably most of https://github.com/simonw , but take care to seperate adopted / semi-professional from exploratory personal work

2. That sounds like your company has a weak engineering culture and is early on its upskilling journey. We explicitly seperate projects into prototypes vs production, where vibes are fine for the former, eg, demos by designers / data scientists / sales engineers but traditional code review standards for whatever is going into production. That mirrors my qualifier in #1.

I find that success here is a combination of engineering seniority, prompting experience, and domain experience . Anything lacking breaks the automation loop, like not knowing how and what to automate. Ex: All of our team finds value in ai coding, but junior engineers struggle on these dimensions, so are not running the 3+ agents that senior ones are.

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

#825

Post by user34283 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

parliament32 wrote: post #790

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…

I assume you're talking about a local application? You don't care if a malicious image you downloaded pwns your PC then? Like CVE-2016-3714

[flagged]

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

#826

Post by timr » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #772

timr wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, now do that for 369,293 stars, 76,193 forks, 138 releases and 2,133 contributors. I expect there is no number I could bring up here that won't be instantly shot down as telling "precisely nothing". My mistake for bringing up any numbers at all. OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without th…

> OK, now do that for 369,293 stars, 76,193 forks, 138 releases and 2,133 contributors.

You're counting forks and stars as code metrics now? Oy.

Look, those aren't nothing -- they're a decent enough proxy for popularity -- but they aren't a rebuttal to the original comment. (The other day some LLM dudebro got a bajillion stars on GH for his vibe-coded hot mess of a repo that sets three environment variables. I should go check the number of commits on that...)

> OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without them. I'm surprised this is a hill I have to die on, but there we are.

The fundamental problem here is that you were asked to provide an example of some software where LLMs have made a revolutionary difference, and OpenClaw is what you chose. That just says a lot, right there.

I don't even really care about that debate, since OpenClaw probably meets the literal requirements of the original question (if not the spirit), and sure, it's had a big splash. But the point of the OP is well-taken: everyone is so "productive", but if the only thing we're seeing from it is Moltbook and 10,001 half-broken pokemon games, then eventually the bloom is going to fall off the rose.

The fact that you felt you had to rebut the "I could do that in a weekend" guy with commit counts is both poetic and oddly fitting for where we are with these things.

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

#827

Post by miki123211 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

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…

In my view, AI is worst at crossing the rubicon from a 200-line script to a maintainable architecture of ~10kloc.

If you already have a decent architecture, adding a new feature is usually fine. If you have nothing and need it to write a 200-line script, that's usually fine. If you need it to figure out a maintainable architecture that will be easy to extend in the future... that;'s where the problems start.

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

#828

Post by Daishiman » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:22 PM UTC

sdevonoes wrote: post #728

Daishiman wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Sounds like you don't read and you don't understand what adds value in a engineering team.

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

#829

Post by mjr00 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

simonw wrote: post #772

timr wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, now do that for 369,293 stars, 76,193 forks, 138 releases and 2,133 contributors. I expect there is no number I could bring up here that won't be instantly shot down as telling "precisely nothing". My mistake for bringing up any numbers at all. OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without th…

> OpenClaw is a good example of a completely new project written using coding agents that made a significant impression on the world and would not have been built without them.

Nobody is denying that OpenClaw is popular, and nobody (in this thread, at least) is denying that AI rapidly speeds up the ability to make an initial release or prototype for greenfield projects. But the comment that spawned this discussion was:

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

The issue is that you're extrapolating OpenClaw, which upon release was a month of pre-AI development work compressed into a few days, to cover the "10 years into 1 year" scenario. However, this isn't appropriate because software development is non-linear. As anyone who has worked on a greenfield project pre-AI should know, those first weeks and months have much faster development cycles. There's no tech debt to worry about; there's no urgent bug tickets or feature requests from customers; there's no thinking about whether it's okay to ship a breaking change.

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

#830

Post by u8 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 3:24 PM UTC

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #704

notnullorvoid wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That doesn't matter. The statement wasn't "faster than AI right now", it was "will always be faster than AI". And that's just nonsense. Current AI systems are extremely serial, in that very little of the inherent parallelism of the problem is utilized. Current-gen AI systems run at most a few hundreds of thousands of operations in parallel, while for frontier models, billions of operations could be run in parallel. O…

Huh, I have to say that I am impressed with Chat Jimmy. No doubt that the hardware running this model operates faster than any human. If this was possible to scale, (and I'm not saying it isn't, I just don't think it's likely right now) LLM's have a real shot of replacing real-time graphics, frontend UIs, and all sorts of interactive media if the market allows it.

I still think regardless of how fast a model outputs tokens, it still benefits the person responsible for that output to be well informed and knowledgeable about the abstractions they're piling on top of. If you have deep knowledge, you can operate faster than other people, and make those important decisions in a more intelligent manner than any model.

Maybe in the model we do get super intelligence and my point will finally break, but at that time I don't think I'll be worried about being wrong on the internet.