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

simonwillison.net

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

#221

Post by simonw »

treespace8 wrote: post #92

I feel like an outlier in all of this. But isn't this just more AI slop? How is this different from text generation or image generation? Like many people I have used AI to generate crap I really don't care about. I need an image. Generate something like, whatever. Great hey a good looking image! No that's done I can do something I find more interesting to do. But it's slop. The image does not fit the context. Its jus…

The difference is that coding agents can run the code that they produce, fix any bugs, build tests and generally demonstrate that it works.

You can't do that for images and text.

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

#222

Post by Keyframe »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

Why are we pretending everyone's code is an etalon of quality? Most software out there is probably hot mess already. No think behind it, let alone ultrathink.

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

#223

Post by mohsen1 »

ai_slop_hater wrote: post #184
mohsen1 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multiple computers and each multiple Claude Code or Codex sessions. It had lots of ups and downs. Now I have a good enough test harness that makes it easier to iterate faster

Do you not run out of things to code?

Code is not the goal. What code does is.

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

#224

Post by ryandrake »

nathan_compton wrote: post #211
ryandrake wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same, if anything, the opposite seems to be true, the ones that I'd call "good engineers" were slower Unfortunately, a lot of workplaces are ignoring this, believing their engineers are assembly line workers, and the ones who complete 10 widgets per minute are simply better than the ones who complete 5 widgets per minute.

It isn't just that they believe this - they want a business model where this is how it works. For a big company a star coder is a liability - they have strong labor power, they can leave and they are hard to replace, etc. Companies want workflows that work with mediocre programmers because they are more like interchangeable parts. This is the real secret to why AI programming will work in a lot of places. If you look…

To these kinds of companies, what's even better than a rack of mediocre programmers? AI agents that you can just conjure up and prompt. They take up no facility space, don't require lunch breaks or vacations, obey all commands and direction, and produce a predictable and consistent amount of output per dollar.

This is the earworm the leaders of these companies have allowed into their minds. Like Agent Mulder, they Want To Believe in this so badly...

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

#225

Post by jmalicki »

rgbrenner wrote: post #218
lelanthran wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If LLMs stop improving at the pace of the last few years (I believe they already are slowing down) Depending on how you measure "improvement" they already have or they never will :-/ Measuring capability of the model as a ratio of context length, you reach the limits at around 300k-400k tokens of context; after that you have diminishing returns. We passed this point. Measuring capability purely by output, smarter h…

300k-400k isn’t the current limit if you create modules and/or organize the code reasonably.. for the same reason we do this for humans: it allows us to interact with a component without loading the internals into out context. you can also execute larger tasks than this using subagents to divide the work so each segment doesn’t exceed the usable context window. i regular execute tasks that require hundreds of subagen…

That makes it not a context window.

How to organize code like you said, and how agents interact with it, to keep the actual context window small is the fundamental challenge.

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

#226

Post by Maxatar »

Keyframe wrote: post #222
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

Why are we pretending everyone's code is an etalon of quality? Most software out there is probably hot mess already. No think behind it, let alone ultrathink.

Exactly, before the rise of LLMs it was not at all uncommon to hear people claiming that their job is to just Google API calls or copy and paste code from Stackoverflow. The context back then was that companies are being picky by hiring people who can demonstrate some modicum of understanding of data structures and algorithms because all any developer does is tweak some CSS or make some calls to a database to glue together a CRUD app... why should anyone be expected to know how to reverse a linked list, or how a basic sorting algorithm works... just download an npm package to do that stuff and glue it all together with a series of nested for loops.

With the rise of LLMs that do all of that... those people shutup and shutup real fast.

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

#227

Post by beAbU »

QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

Have you ever worked on a legacy codebase with actual good code? I struggle to see the difference between your predicted future and today's reality when it comes to working with legacy disasters.

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

#228

Post by turtlebits »

The scary part is that codebases are getting layers of AI complexity, that it's going to cost $$$ to have the latest model decipher and make changes as no human can understand the code anymore.

Pretty soon there is no code reuse and we're burning money reinventing the wheel over and over.

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

#229

Post by jeromegv »

beAbU wrote: post #227
QuantumNomad_ wrote: post #7

People in the future are going to wonder what the hell we were thinking, when 30 years down the line everything is a hot mess of billions of lines of code generated by LLMs that no human has read almost any of it and is no longer possible for anyone to maintain neither with nor without LLMs. And the LLM generated garbage will have drowned out all of the good quality code that ever existed and no one will be able to f…

Have you ever worked on a legacy codebase with actual good code? I struggle to see the difference between your predicted future and today's reality when it comes to working with legacy disasters.

Well, on legacy code base, you still needed humans to write those lines of code. There's a maximal amount of lines a human can write in a year.

Now with LLM we are talking of millions and millions of line of code that could be generated in a single day. The scale of the problem might not be the same at all.

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

#230

Post by wek »

What an excellent article by a smart, humble, still-learning person!

Favorite quote:" There are a whole bunch of reasons I’m not scared that my career as a software engineer is over now that computers can write their own code, partly because these things are amplifiers of existing experience. If you know what you’re doing, you can run so much faster with them. [...]

I’m constantly reminded as I work with these tools how hard the thing that we do is. Producing software is a ferociously difficult thing to do. And you could give me all of the AI tools in the world and what we’re trying to achieve here is still really difficult. [...]"

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