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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#411

Post by simonw »

hu3 wrote: post #394

Can anyone suggest solution(s) to create temporary preview environments per branch or Pull Request? For example if someone creates a Pull Request "#2122 feat: User password change" Automation would deploy it to pr_2122_feat_user_password_change.mycompany.com

Heroku and Vercel and Render all have features that can do this. You can wire up your own for other hosting providers using a lot of scripting on top of GitHub Actions.

Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-rev...

Vercel: https://vercel.com/docs/deployments/environments#preview-env...

Render: https://render.com/docs/service-previews

Re: Vibe engineering

#412

Post by girvo »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #357
codr7 wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't seen any evidence to match these repeated claims of increased efficiency. What I have seen is reports that makes a lot of sense to me claiming it's all in the user's head.

I'm working in corporate and haven't seen it yet. The main thing I see is blogs and whatnot of people building new weekend projects with LLMs, that is, greenfield, non-critical software - the type of software that, if I were to write it, I wouldn't bother with CI, tests, that kind of thing with. Sloppy projects, if you will. But happy to be corrected - is someone using these agents in their paid / professional / ente…

I am, but in a very narrow focus: mostly examining our existing codebase as a more powerful but fuzzier search, and a system to then generate a plan to implement and approach which I tweak.

I sometimes use it to scaffold out some boilerplate for tests, but never tests themselves: no matter what I try it always ends up writing the useless straight-jacket "change alert" style tests that break on any change to the unit under test, which I despise.

Re: Vibe engineering

#413

Post by mnky9800n »

lemming wrote: post #205
simonw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really sorry to hear this, because part of my goal here is to help push back against the idea that "programming skills are useless now, anyone can get an LLM to write code for them". I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents. You can take everything you've learned up to this point and accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of too…

While this is true, I definitely find that the style of the work changes a lot. It becomes much more managerial, and less technical. I feel much more like a mix of project and people manager, but without the people. I feel like the jury is still out on whether I’m overall more productive, but I do feel like I have less fun.

I also think that managing a coding agent isnt like managing a person. a person is creative, they will come up with ways that challenge whatever idea you have and that usually makes the project better. A coding agent never challenges you, mostly just does whatever you want, and you don't end up having any kind of intellectual person to person engagement that is why working on teams can be fun. So it kind of isolates you. And I think the primary reason all this happens is because marketing people have decided to call all of these coding agents "Artificial Intelligence" instead of "Dev Tools". And instead of calling it "Security" they now call it "AI Alignment". And instead of calling it "data schema" or "Spec sheet" they call it "managing the AI context". So now, we are all biased to see these things as some kind of entity that we can treat something like a colleague and we all bought this idea because the tool can chat with you. But it isn't a colleague, it doesn't think and feel, it doesn't provide intellectual engagement, it simply is a lossy, noisy tool to try and translate human language into computer language whether its python or machine code.

Re: Vibe engineering

#414

Post by simonw »

mrzool wrote: post #387
visarga wrote: post #379

Is "vibe engineering" a correct term for this? It's not vibe based when you scaffold constraints around the agent: automated testing, planning in advance, comprehensive documentation, automated formatting and linting, and manual QA. Don't get me wrong, I started vibe coding after reading Karpathy's post. I got the memo - don't review every line of code, don't stop it when it stumbles, let it recover on its own, trust…

> Is "vibe engineering" a correct term for this? Anything with the word “vibe” in it sounds silly and unserious imho. What’s wrong with something neutral and descriptive like “LLM-assisted programming”? Not catchy enough?

Yes, not catchy enough. I tried to get "AI-assisted programming" to take off for a couple of years, it got no traction at all.

Re: Vibe engineering

#415

Post by davemp »

energy123 wrote: post #211
sph wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years. But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line commit…

I don't really agree. The writing is on the wall, if not now then in 2 years or 4 years. I arrive at this view not so much based on the capabilities of the tools right now, but based on the property of software being verifiable, which like mathematics, makes it amenable to synthetic data pipelines, with only relatively small remaining details needing to be worked out (such as how to endow architectural taste). This i…

> property of software being verifiable

Software is verifiable given a specific test oracle. There are however many problems where providing a correct test oracle is at least as hard as solving the problem itself.

If you’ve ever worked on projects with “Model Based Systems Engineering” you’ll have felt this pain.

Re: Vibe engineering

#416

Post by radarsat1 »

dotancohen wrote: post #232
input_sh wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy your last sentence at all. AGENTS.md is just a place to put stuff you don't want to tell LLMs over and over again. They're not magical instructions LLMs follow 100% of the time, they don't carry any additional importance over what you put into the prompt manually. Your carefully curated AGENTS.md is only really useful at the very beginning of the conversation, but the longer the conversation gets, the les…

We really should be sharing wisdom about AGENTS.md files here.

I thought about making some kind of community project where people could contribute their lines to a common file, and even some kind of MCP server or RAG system that automatically selects relevant "rules" given a certain project context. Do you think there would be interest in something like that?

Re: Vibe engineering

#417

Post by karel-3d »

subarctic wrote: post #151

I just feel so discouraged reading this somehow. I used to have this hard-to-get, in-demand skill that paid lots of money and felt like even though programming languages, libraries and web frameworks were always evolving I could always keep up because I'm smart. But now with these people like Simon Willison writing about the new way of coding with these agents and multiple streams of work going on at a time and it so…

My approach is to just tune out whenever I hear about this stuff.

I don't want it, I don't use it, I carry on as if it never existed, and they still pay me a lot.

If I really need to use agents some day I will bite the bullet, but, not today.

Literally all I use LLMs for is to ask ChatGPT about some dumb thing or two instead of asking StackOverflow as I did 5 years ago. Works for me.

Re: Vibe engineering

#418

Post by radarsat1 »

TurboHaskal wrote: post #281
ReptileMan wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You were never paid to type. You were paid to solve problems. And big part of this is being able to ask the right questions and framing of the problems. The rest were just tools. There are exceptions of course - where you need to squeeze wonders from the hardware - but the majority of dev works boils to understanding the problem and finding the right answers.

You say this because you are on HN, very senior and/or living in a bubble. In the vast majority of programming jobs out there you are not paid to solve problems: you are told very clearly what to do, how to do it and what technology you have to use for the job. People don't hire analysts they hire "Java programmers".

> how to do it

If you've ever lead a team, you know how much more valuable people are if they don't need to be told how to do things. Even more if they don't need to be told what to do! But having to explain in detail the "how".. can be really a big time sink and only worth it if you are training someone to level up.

Re: Vibe engineering

#419

Post by fatata123 »

computerex wrote: post #332
hollowturtle wrote: post #294

I don't get the obsession some tech people have to push the idea that this stuff accelerate your coding, increase your productivity. It's all about fast and faster output. In my experience LLMs have mostly produced gibberish oververbose code, surely faster than me, but my lower speed usually produce better code. I don't like this present state of things where we need to chat faster to quickly get out results and go f…

We live in an objective reality. LLM's help a damn lot in speed of development. As someone who has been coding since 5th grade for over 20 years who is known to be a LIGHTNING FAST implementor by many people I have been scaled ridiculously with LLM's. Genie is out of the bag, you have to go with the flow, adapt or else.... I am just as pissed as anybody else at the lack of certainty in the future.... Thought I had my…

[dead]

Re: Vibe engineering

#420

Post by Kzozjj »

codr7 wrote: post #327
simonw wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really sorry to hear this, because part of my goal here is to help push back against the idea that "programming skills are useless now, anyone can get an LLM to write code for them". I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents. You can take everything you've learned up to this point and accelerate the impact you can have with this new family of too…

I still haven't seen any evidence to match these repeated claims of increased efficiency. What I have seen is reports that makes a lot of sense to me claiming it's all in the user's head.

There was an article on here not too long ago - I can’t find it now - where the authors discussed how they leaned full in on it and were submitting 20k+ line PRs to open source projects in languages they were not very familiar with.

However, they mentioned you had to let go of reviewing every line of every PR. I read that and was fine with holding off on full vibe coding for now. Nobody intelligent would pay for that and no competent developer would operate like that.

I have a couple coworkers big on it. The lesser skilled ones are miserable to work with. I’ve kept my same code review process but number of comments left has at least 5x’d (not just from me, either). And I’m not catching everything - I get fatigued and call it done. Duplicated logic, missed edge cases, arbitrary patterns and conventions, etc. The high skilled ones less so, but I still don’t look forward to reviewing their PRs anymore. Too much work on my end.

There are many devs who are more focused on results than being correct. These are the ones I’ve seen most drawn to LLMs/agents. There’s a place for these devs, but having worked on an aging startups codebase, I hope there aren’t too many.

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