Vibe Coding and the Future of Software Engineering

I feel people/hypers keep rumbling about many things and way too often seem they have no real life experience.

The biggest problem I’ve seen over 20 years long career is people and the games they play (on different levels of leadership and management within an org) and their inability to agree to and then verbalise what on Earth they want. No matter is it a greenfield or some digital transformation project, they a plagued by fear and self-interest (of various kind).

And even if/when they identify a problem (e.g. games players) it becomes a risky cutting the cord since the one needs to identify who to rely on to clean the mess and their confidence caves in (often) while resolving to “let’s layoff x number of ‘leaf’ employees” is safe scared-with-no-vision leader move and it looks good on the stock market.

Software engineers (generally) kept delivering despite all that for years across the board (generally). And, generally, kept their values and principles and that bothers this managerial class a lot it seems and they (in a way) can’t wait to stop paying “those nerds” big salaries and that’s why those often low values and unprincipled people can’t wait to see our backs and are getting hyped about this “AI will replace SD/SE” mantra.

All this above is obviously generally speaking but yeah we people tend way to often to misplace our focus and solve lesser priority problems, and this “ai replacing engineers” is one of them to a good degree.

And for the majority of software developers there is nothing to worry about. The sheer keep-knowledge-up-to-date demand this industry put on us primed us to be by far the most able professional group to jump into a career change in no time.

Which other group in huge numbers can just sit down and learn and work for 10 hours a day 7 days a week and not complain or get emotionally disturbed (too much) and get the thing but us.

So in the worst case scenario we will be fine, others should be scared if we in numbers pick their industry to move into.

1. Context sizes are going to grow. Gemini with 2M tokens is already doing amazing feats

2. We all agree that we should break bigger problems into smaller ones. So if you can isolate the problem into something that fits in a LLM context, no matter how large the larger software system is, you can make a lot of quick progress by leveraging LLMs for that isolated piece of software.

You want to have an LLM help you crap out a script, sure, but you mean to tell me you'd seriously consider using an LLM for a production systems that affects real people that deals with real people's real data and call yourself a software "engineer"?

Engineering is about designing systems that serve society and provably meet well specified constraints. You don't want the god damn bridge to collapse under load. If you feel comfortable using an LLM to "engineer" a software system, you ought to feel comfortable letting civil engineers "vibe out" their bridge designs. God this hype cycle has just made a complete mockery of this whole industry and I have no respect for the clowns pushing this shit.

The real complicated "bugs" often come from unclear requirements and the hard part is clearing up the requirements. It's more about design than logic errors in the code. And LLMs suck hard at this.