111–120 of 213 posts
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Theoretically a PM could say "the code is disposable and obsoleted by the next deployment. let's just document our prompts." I don't know if that's a good idea but a lot of people are going to try it.
It's like NixOS but instead of the much-maligned Nix language, you can use the English language! What could go wrong?
This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…
More than one project manager has insisted that everything about the system must be documented--that's called the source code. As you say, by the time you specify everything , you've written the code.
Sadly not when it’s a 2000 page word document with a million formatting quirks and so many copy-paste versions you don’t know if you should trust “reqs_new25”, “reqs_new25v1” or the x number of other copies floating around.
So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…
The definition seems to have pretty rapidly moved to 'used an AI coding assistant in some capacity'.
I wonder if maybe some people have been trying to jump on the "I have also tried vibe coding" train without being willing to hop as far as the term initiator defined it.
I definitely still stick to the "Vibe Coding is when you don't read / grok the code" definition.
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I absolutely hate the polarization around "vibe coding". The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do. It's okay to dogfood and test them now and see how well they do, and improve them over time. Software engineers will eventually become managers of AI agents. Vibe coding is just version 0.1 pre-alpha of that future.
> Software engineers will eventually become managers of AI agents. Source? This seems very optimistic on both ends (that AI will replace SE work, AND SEs will still be employed to manage them).
Different people clearly mean different things when they talk about software quality. There is quality as perceived by the user: few bugs, accurately models the problem they have, no more complicated than necessary, etc. Then there is this other notion of quality as something to do with how the software is built. How neat and clear it is. How easy it is to extend or change. The first kind of quality is the only kind…
An AI will be as flustered by spaghetti as a human. Or not so much flustered it will just make willy willy changes and end up in an expensive infinite loop of test failures and drunken changes to try and fix them.
It totally depends on the use case. As a consultant the majority of my work is around business process automation and integrating cloud systems. We build a lot of small "applications" that change almost constantly. The number of concurrent users is low, the lifespan of the software typically short and to justify the effort has to be done quickly and efficiently. It's 100% "value engineering". AI agent pairing has bee…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I absolutely hate the polarization around "vibe coding". The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do. It's okay to dogfood and test them now and see how well they do, and improve them over time. Software engineers will eventually become managers of AI agents. Vibe coding is just version 0.1 pre-alpha of that future.
"The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do" You can be an enthusiastic adopter of AI tooling (like I am) without wanting them to eventually be better than humans at everything. I'm very much still in the "augment, don't replace" camp when it comes to AI tooling.
I'm okay with directing AI to write exactly the software I need, without having to manage "stakeholders", deal with the egos of boomers up the management chain, and all the shitty things certain people do in any organizations that get large enough.
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> Last year, the one girl, who did seem to try to follow some common sense approach, got fired for effectively using common sense against big boss wishes. What did your manager say when you said this to them?
If my manager fire somebody for using common sense, I’m not going to tell them anything. Because I can be next.
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> The first kind of quality is the only kind that matters in the end. How easy it is to maintain and extend does absolutely matter, in a world where software is constantly growing and evolving and never "finished"
I'm not disagreeing with you. Just an observation though: There seems to be a world in software where "it works" well enough to grow a large user base to achieve a a large valuation and then dip out is also a viable option. Growing/evolving the code does not matter because the product no longer matters after the founders have made a large sum of money.
You're harming:
* your customers who trusted you
* the people that purchased your product
There’s nothing wrong with iterating fast or building MVPs. But when teams knowingly pass off a brittle mess to others, they’ve stopped building products and started selling lies.