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

Post by redsocksfan45 » Thu, May 07, 2026, 8:51 PM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #484

xmprt wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll go in the other direction and say that if you're spending a lot of your time learning to prompt better then you're wasting it because LLMs are only going to get better at understanding your intent regardless of "prompt engineering". The JSON API example to wire up a database can be one-shot pretty easily by the latest models without much context and without setting up any harness. The more time you spend perfect…

The hardest thing about software engineering has always been that your intent often has to be decided on the fly once you get into complicated edge cases, weird-or-legacy-business requirements, or things that the spec literally has no answers for. Letting the tool figure out your assumed intent on those things is a double-edged sword. Better than you never even thinking of them. But potentially either subtle broken c…

Post by sarchertech » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

theshrike79 wrote: post #810

eloisius wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t contain any information at all about the structure of the JSON output. Is this a greenfield endpoint and anything will work is does it need to conform to an existing API? What about response codes for different failure modes? What about logging? Your comment exemplifies what a lot of people complain about vibe coding: it works great for greenfielding CRUD apps, but it’s a bitch to use in a real code base.

If it's not a greenfield project, the Agent will go and look at the other endpoints and mimic the style as much as possible. Just like a human would. "But we have documentati..." then give the Agent access to the same docs as humans and it'll use them.

Post by jwpapi » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

senordevnyc wrote: post #853

jwpapi wrote: post #373

> I know full well that if you ask Claude Code to build a JSON API endpoint that runs a SQL query and outputs the results as JSON, it’s just going to do it right. It’s not going to mess that up. You have it add automated tests, you have it add documentation, you know it’s going to be good. I feel like this is just not true. An JSON API endpoint also needs several decisions made. - How should the endpoint be named - W…

This is just bizarre to me. Do people not use Plan mode? I start by telling the agent what I'm trying to accomplish, and then I throw in some questions like this, concerns I have, edge cases I've thought about, whatever. It goes out and does all the research, both in my code base and beyond, asks me questions where it needs clarification, and then writes me a plan. I review the plan, we go back and forth a bit with a…

Post by retinaros » Thu, May 07, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #305

retinaros wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its trash vibecoded markdown files around pi. This exemplifies well what op’is saying. We are at the ICO stage of llms. Hopefully there wont be an nft one

As much as I love to hate on AI: even the bad apples still produce something that one can reasonably work with. Cryptocurrencies? Barely any other use than money laundering, buying drugs and betting on the outcome of battles in war. And NFTs? No use at all other than money laundering and setting money ablaze.

Post by timschmidt » Thu, May 07, 2026, 10:21 PM UTC

necovek wrote: post #615

timschmidt wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a level above that where the words to describe such structure are familiar and readily available and hey guess what? The model understands those too. Just about every pattern has a name. Or a shape. Or an analog or metaphor in other languages or codebases. All work as descriptors.

This presumes that most of this stays encoded as words in our brains: the effort to translate some of these into words might be similar to translating it into code (still words, just very precise). It's like talking legalese vs plain English; or formal logic vs English. Some people have the formal stuff come more naturally, and then spitting code out is not a burden.