Have to wonder about the motivations of research when the intro leads with such a quote.
Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
161–170 of 259 posts
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex. The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March. I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885
Ok I will bite. Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it. However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain…
I worked at Slack earlier this year. Slack adopted Cursor as an option in December of 2024 if memory serves correctly. I had just had a project cut due to a lot of unfortunate reasons so I was working on it with one other engineer. It was a rewrite of a massive and old Python code base that ran Slack's internal service catalog. The only reason I was able to finish rewrites of the backend, frontend, and build an SLO sub-system is because of coding agents. Up until December I'd been doing that entire rewrite through sixteen hour days and just pure sweat equity.
Again, that codebase is millions of lines of Python code and frankly the agents weren't as good then as they are now. I carefully used globbing rules in Cursor to navigate coding and testing standards. I had a rule that functioned as how people use agents.md now, which was put on every prompt. That honestly got me a lot more mileage than you'd think. A lot of the outcomes of these tools are how you use them and how good your developer experience is. If professional software engineers have to think about how to navigate and iterate on different parts of your code, then an LLM will find it doubly difficult.
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
The stereotype that writing code is for junior developers needs to die. Some devs are hired with lofty titles specifically for their programming aptitude and esoteric systems knowlege, not to play implementation telephone with inexperienced devs.
I don't think that anyone actually believes that writing code is only for junior developers. That seems to be a significant exaggeration at the very least. However, it is definitely true that most organizations of this size are hiring people into technical lead, staff engineer, or principal engineer roles are hiring those people not only for their individual expertise, or ability to apply that expertise themselves, b…
> I don't think that anyone actually believes that writing code is only for junior developers.
That is, unquestionably, how it ought to be. However, the mainstream – regrettably – has devolved into a well-worn and intellectually stagnant trajectory, wherein senior developers are not merely encouraged but expected to abandon the coding altogether, ascending instead into roles such as engineering managers (no offence – good engineering managers are important, it is the quality that has been diluted across the board), platform overseers (a new term for stage gate keepers), or so-called solution architects (the ones who are imbued with compliance, governance and do not venture out past that).
In this model, neither role is expected – and in some lamentable cases, is explicitly forbidden[0] – to engage directly with code. The result is a sterile detachment from the very systems they are charged with overseeing.
Worse still, the industry actively incentivises ill-considered career leaps – for instance, elevating a developer with limited engineering depth into the position of a solution designer or architect. The outcome is as predictable as it is corrosive: individuals who can neither design nor architect.
The number of organisations in which expert-level coding proficiency remains the norm at senior or very senior levels has dwindled substantially over the past couple of decades or so – job ads explicitly call out the management experience, knowledge of vacuous or limited usefulness architectural frameworks (TOGAF and alike). There do remain rare islands in an ever-expanding ocean of managerial abstraction where architects who write code, not incessantly but when a need be, are still recognised as invaluable. Yet their presence is scarce.
The lamentable state of affairs has led to a piquant situation on the job market. In recent years, headhunters have started complaining about being unable to find an actually highly proficient, experienced, and, most importantly, technical architect. One's loss is another one's gain, or at least an opportunity, of course.
[0] Speaking from firsthand experience of observing a solution architect to have quit their job to run a bakery (yes) due to the head of architecture they were reporting to explicitly demanding the architect quit coding. The architect did quit, albeit in a different way.
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex. The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March. I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885
Ok I will bite. Every single example you gave is in a hobby project territory. Relatively self-contained, maintainable by 3-4 devs max, within 1k-10k lines of code. I've been successfully using coding agents to create such projects for the past year and it's great, I love it. However, lots of us here work on codebases that are 100x, 1000x the size of these projects you and Karpathy are talking about. Years of domain…
Everything is made of smaller parts. I'd like to think we can sub divide a code base into isolated modules at least.
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#165This is pretty recent - the survey they ran (99 respondents) was August 18 to September 23 2025 and the field observations (watching developers for 45 minute then a 30 minute interview, 13 participants) were August 1 to October 3. The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one mention of Sonnet 4.5.) This is notable because a lot of acade…
I’m glad someone else noticed the time frames — turns out the lead author here has published 28 distinct preprints in the past 60 days, almost all of which are marked as being officially published already/soon.
Certainly some scientists are just absurdly efficient and all 28 involved teams, but that’s still a lot.
Personally speaking, this gives me second thoughts about their dedication to truly accurately measuring something as notoriously tricky as corporate SWE performance. Any number of cut corners in a novel & empirical study like this would be hard to notice from the final product, especially for casual readers…TBH, the clickbait title doesn’t help either!
I don’t have a specific critique on why 4 months is definitely too short to do it right tho. Just vibe-reviewing, I guess ;)
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the difference between using llms now vs the first half of 2025 among the best users?
Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex. The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March. I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885
Are there techniques though? Tech pairing? Something we know now that we didn't then? Or just better models?
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coding agents and much better models. Claude Code or Codex CLI plus Claude Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2 Codex. The latest models and harnesses can crunch on difficult problems for hours at a time and get to working solutions. Nothing could do that back in ~March. I shared some examples in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46436885
I was going back and looking at timelines, and was shocked to realize that Claude Code and Cursor's default-to-agentic-mode changes both came out in late February. Essentially the entire history of "mainstream" agentic coding is ten months old. (This helps me understand better the people who are confused/annoyed/dismissive about it, because I remember how dismissive people were about Node, about Docker, about Postgre…
The entire history of RL-trained "reasoning models" from o1 to DeepSeek_R1 is basically just a year old!
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#168The title is provocative but there's truth to it. The distinction between "vibing" with AI tools and actually controlling the output is crucial for production code.
I've seen this with code generation tools - developers who treat AI suggestions as magic often struggle when the output doesn't work or introduces subtle bugs. The professionals who succeed are those who understand what the AI is doing, validate the output rigorously, and maintain clear mental models of their system.
This becomes especially important for code quality and technical debt. If you're just accepting AI-generated code without understanding architectural implications, you're building a maintenance nightmare. Control means being able to reason about tradeoffs, not just getting something that "works" in the moment.
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.
I'm too young to have used VB in the workforce, but I did use it in school, and honestly off that alone I'm inclined to agree. I've seen VB namedropped frequently, but I feel like I've yet to see a proper discussion of why it seems like nothing can match its productivity and ease of use for simple desktop apps. Like, what even is the modern approach for a simple GUI program? Is Electron really the best we can do? MS…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnaGZHe8wws
This is a nice video on why Electron is the best you might be able to do.
Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. I've been a tech lead, have led large, cross-org projects, been an engineering manager, and similar roles. For years, when mentoring upcoming developers what I always to be the most challenging transition was the inflection point between "I deliver most of my value by coding" to "I deliver most of my value by empowering other people to deliver". I think that's what we're seeing here. People who have made thi…
LLMs are just a programming language/compiler/REPL, though, so there is nothing out of the ordinary for developers. Except what is different is the painfully slow compile time to code ratio. You write code for a few minutes... and then wait. Then spend a few more minutes writing code... and then wait. That is where the exhaustion comes from. At least in the olden days[1] you could write code for days before compiling…
Programming languages are structured and have specifications. It is possible to know what code will do just by reading it.