Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can keep telling yourself that. I have seen the results from others making the same arguments. The result is invariably trash.
My agentic workflow probably differs somewhat from the majority of others here, but I can positively guarantee you that both the quality and quantity of my output is significantly higher than it has ever been, in my 20-something years of writing code. And at least 90÷ of the code I've written this year was output by an LLM. You can keep sticking your head in the sand, in the end it will only be to your own detriment.
Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
921–930 of 958 posts
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#922Earlier quoted context omitted.
The exceptions that prove the rule. When your programming language is built up of singular Unicode characters with specific meanings, of course that's faster than typing out in English what you want. What do you use them for? For most AI users it's usually CRUD and I've never seen a web server or frontend in APL like languages.
The exception is the rule. The reason why programming is hard is because most languages force you to use a hammer when you need a screw driver. LLMs are very good at misusing hammers and most people find them useful for that reason. If you use a sane dsl instead the natural language description of a problem is always more complex and much longer than the equivalent description in a dsl. It's also usually wrong to boo…
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#923Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#924Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is you: >> I think all coding will become vibe coding... Nope. First of all, Let's get the true definition of "vibe coding" completely clear from the first mention of it from Karpathy. From [0]: >> "There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." [0] >> "I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. Whe…
Even ignoring the semantic drift that has happened since he coined the term (on which there have already been a few HN threads), the key part of Karpathy's definition is "...and forget that the code even exists." Which is why I was careful to phrase it thus: > So this is still engineering, but it will be vibe coding in the sense that we almost never look at the code, we just look at the results. It is pretty clear th…
The point of bringing up the exact definition is to draw a clear line on what defines "vibe-coding" in the first place. There is no "semantic drift" and, karpathy's entire tweet is used as the definition and I don't think you can separate any part of it at all.
In your first post, you mentioned "vibe coding" and by definition it includes not looking at the code and accepting all changes the AI agent suggests and copy pasting errors back to the agent until it is fixed without any understanding; exactly how karpathy first defined it.
> It is pretty clear that "giving in to the vibes" is simply "looking at the results."
Seems like you don't even understand what vibe coding is. "giving into the vibes" is not just looking at the results, it is not looking at the code and accepting all the agent's output without any understanding of the code.
> But I'm predicting that it is going to be an engineering discipline in itself. Note that I started with (emphasis added):
"Vibe coding" is not engineering anymore than "coding" is not software engineering.
> And then I went on to explain the engineering aspect as extensive technical validation. There is a role called Validation Engineers in many industries including semiconductors, and I posit that it's going to be everybody's primary role soon.
It already is, in the form of quality assurance. This was there for years alongside formal verification engineers and validation engineers for years and "vibe coding" is incompatible with all of this and breaks the software development lifecycle.
These roles were already a given at many companies, so there is nothing new that you actually said.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#925Earlier quoted context omitted.
Complete nonsense. There are people who write software for hedge funds, quant firms, aviation and defense systems, data center providers, major telecom services used by hospitals and emergency services and semiconductor firms and the big oil and energy companies and that is NOT "almost no-one" and these companies see and make hundreds of billions of dollars a year on average. This is even before me mentioning big tec…
I would prefer hedge funds and traders to vibe code their software. Heck I am willing to do it if I mist.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#926Earlier quoted context omitted.
sometimes you write the feature and write it well so it's reusable. imagine you have to implement a specific algorithm for a quantum computer. There's no value setting up AI to do the writing for you. That might be orders of magnitude harder then writing the algorithm directly. For highly specialized one-off features, it doesn't always pay off. On the other hand, if all you do are some generic items that AI can do we…
That feels like true in theory, but in practice, we see the reverse for advanced projects where AI is helping us a lot. A decent chunk of our core IP falls into the bucket you're describing: We have been building a GPU-accelerated graph investigation platform that has grown over 10+ years with fancy stuff all over the place - think accelerated query languages, layout kernels, distribution, etc. R&D-grade high perform…
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#927Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is actually my biggest gripe with vibecoding. The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise. And that is what we throw out?! I favor of natural language , of all things?! We're insane!
Historically we almost entirely moved from ASM to C, a language with lots of undefined behavior, because precision is not the most valued feature of languages.
Your suggestion that because languages have specified undefined behaviour, they are somehow not precise, makes little sense.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#928Earlier quoted context omitted.
UB is about edge cases that a compiler should not be enforced to check against and an occurrence is always a bug. You don't necessarily need a precise description of the actual faulty behavior.
Right. The language has well-formed expressions with no defined meaning in terms of machine instructions. My claim is that this is a reduction in precision compared to assembly language. Grandparent said: > The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise. C overtook a more precise language family because it has features other than precision that people cared about. Perhaps a better tradeoff…
To me, the notion of precision isn't in any way related to whether any given statement is sound. It's about the behavior of the language for sound programs.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#929Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've clearly never been addicted to anything. You seem to have little understanding of, or empathy for, those who have become addicted. I quit smoking cigarettes. It took years. It was incredibly difficult on an emotional level, and took a lot of failure and disappointment to finally make it through. And I almost lost all my progress when I relapsed after my Dad died unexpectedly. Every pair of eyes that you see wa…
You might disagree with my point, but you don't know me and you can't really lecture me on empathy. You just glossed over the parts of the argument where I am for discussing public policies that we can implement to care for those that suffer from addiction. But at the individual level, after recognizing the hardships of being addicted to anything, the ultimate choice and responsibility to do something is yours. Your…
This is contradictory. Once you are addicted, the choice is no longer “entirely yours”. That’s what being an addict means, your physiology and your wants are in conflict and require constant active vigilance to contradict. Your head begins to rationalise and you’ll even forget you wanted to stop. If it were simply “entirely your choice”, addiction wouldn’t be an issue.
The advertising and other factors which caused you to become addicted don’t stop after you are addicted. So if you’re willing to admit that external factors may trigger the problem, you must be able to comprehend those factors also contribute to stopping you from solving it. But now you have your own biology as another obstacle.
I agree with you that the previous commenter made unreasonable assumptions about you, but I agree with them that at least in this particular conversation you’re not demonstrating empathy for the addict. What you’re essentially saying, repeatedly, is that they’re choosing to be addicts because they don’t simply choose to stop. This is not true, and you’ll quickly realise that if you engage with addicts, especially if they’re someone you knew from before. There is a transformation, addiction turns you into a different person you don’t always recognise.
Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like
#930Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
LOC is very much an effective metric for general productivity for the median feature. You can't code golf most lines of code out of existence. We're also assuming LOC vibe coded by competent engineers who should be able to tell when something is overengineered.