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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#561

Post by walleeee »

executesorder66 wrote: post #368
rhetocj23 wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I don’t get - If you spend much of your time reviewing, you’re just reading - you’re not actually doing anything - you’re passive in the activity of code production. By extension you will become worse at knowing what a good standard of code is and become worse at reviewing code. I’m not a SWE so I have no interests to protect by criticising what is going on.

Tell that to Linus Torvalds. His whole job is just doing code review, and I'd argue he's better at coding now than he ever was before.

It's not only that Linus is atypical, it's also that he is reviewing other people's code, and those people are also highly competent, or they would not be kernel committers. And they all share large amounts of high-quality and hard-earned implicit context.

Reviewing well executed changesets by skilled developers on complicated and deliberate projects is not comparable to "fleet of agents" vibe engineering. One of these tasks will sharpen you regardless how lazily you approach it. The other requires extreme discipline to avoid atrophy.

Re: Vibe engineering

#562

Post by yobid20 »

These people havent deployed anything to a production environment that requires reliability and support. For that, you need a real software engineer to take apart the mess of vibe coded kludge and create real software that can actually be given to people to use. I wouldnt worry about this. Vibe coding trend is already on its way out as people discover this.

Re: Vibe engineering

#563

Post by samiv »

agentultra wrote: post #486
sally_glance wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said! Reading this I feel reminded of the early protests against industrialization and automation in other fields. Checks all the same boxes - insecurity and fear about the future, alienation towards the new tools, ... Not saying AI is similar in impact to the loom or something, it just occured to me how close this is to early Luddite texts.

Many Luddites were fine with using the new Loom machines. They smashed them because they were precious to the capital holders and in a time when there were no labour laws. The Luddites were protesting child labour, forced labour, and having no social safety net when they were discarded by their employers other than workhouses.

This has been the dream of the capital classes since time immemorial.

And unfortunately (for humanity) this has been the status quo for the whole civilization. Small ruling elite class (you might designate them as masters, lords or employers) with all the wealth, minimal or no "middle class" and lots of poor people (you might designate them as peasants or slaves or workers).

The only exception to this has been the period of time since World War 2 when in most of the "western" countries the middle class demanded and took their share of the wealth. That's the time when modern well-fare states were born, universal health care became a thing, working safety improved, education became accessible. etc.

All these were NOT given by the elite but TAKEN by the working class via social reforms, workers unions and social democracy.

The capital owning class wants to take all these away and they're succeeding.

So yes, in fact the Luddites were not against technology, they were against the unilateral and uneven distribution of wealth produced by the technology.

Re: Vibe engineering

#564

Post by herval »

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…

I have a relative who's in her 70s and used to be a coder. She told me she gave up coding when people introduced computers with terminals. She was used to filling out punch cards and felt like the way she worked, although constantly evolving, was something she could keep up with. When the new stuff came, with virtual programs and you just typing on a computer and no way to properly debug by shuffling the cards around, she ended up moving to something completely different...

Re: Vibe engineering

#565

Post by herval »

pron wrote: post #466
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'm not sure that having the patience to work with something with a very inconsistent performance and that frequently lies is an extension of existing development skills. It doesn't work like tools developers use and it doesn't work like people developers work with. Furthermore, techniques of working with agents today may be completely outdated a year from now. The acceleration is also inconsistent: sometimes there's…

> I'm not sure that having the patience to work with something with a very inconsistent performance and that frequently lies is an extension of existing development skills.

that's a basic skill you gotta have if you're leading anything or anyone. There'll always be levels of that. So if you're planning to lead anyone in your career, it's a good skillset to develop

Re: Vibe engineering

#566

Post by nadis »

I like the idea of finding an alternative name to "vibe coding" to describe this more substantive alternative. However, I personally think the name "vibe engineering" is too close to vibe coding and not sufficiently distinct.

I don't have a great alternative unfortunately. I've used "agentic coding" in the past as a means of differentiating from vibe coding, but I don't think that's necessarily clear enough either.

That said, maybe with defining this new approach it's just going to take time for any term to become familiar enough to be self-explanatory.

Re: Vibe engineering

#567

Post by reaperducer »

nadis wrote: post #566

I like the idea of finding an alternative name to "vibe coding" to describe this more substantive alternative. However, I personally think the name "vibe engineering" is too close to vibe coding and not sufficiently distinct. I don't have a great alternative unfortunately. I've used "agentic coding" in the past as a means of differentiating from vibe coding, but I don't think that's necessarily clear enough either. T…

However, I personally think the name "vibe engineering" is too close to vibe coding and not sufficiently distinct.

Funny, because when I saw that phrase I immediately thought, "They're using chatbots to design bridges now?"

Re: Vibe engineering

#568

Post by adi4213 »

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…

I think the key is remind yourself is that an engineer is supposed to solve business problems. So use these new tools to be more effective in doing so. An analogy is that people used to spend tons of time building out web server code but something like Django added tremendously useful abstractions and patterns to doing so, which allowed people to more productively add business value

Re: Vibe engineering

#569

Post by subarctic »

bob1029 wrote: post #226
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…

If you're genuinely already good at coding, use the LLM to go horizontal into other complementary verticals that were too expensive to enter prior. Do the same thing that the other professions would do unto yours. As an example, I would have never considered learning to use blender for 3d modeling in a game before having access to an LLM. The ability to quickly iterate through plausible 3d workflows and different des…

Thanks for this, I like your idea about breaking into areas I don't have experience with. E.g. in my case I might make a mobile app which I've never done before, and in theory it should be a lot easier with Claude than it would've been with just googling and reading documentation. Although I did kind of like that process of reading documentation and learning something new but you can't learn everything, you only have so much time on this planet

Re: Vibe engineering

#570

Post by edelans »

simonw wrote: post #168
apsurd wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "manage a fleet of massively parallelized agents" gets me uneasy too. It sounds uber powerful on its face. And where all the nerd interest lies. It sounds stressful, like the ultimate manager job. Not what I signed up for. But I also still hold onto this idea that shipping tons of iterations of "stuff" was never really the problem. Early in my dev experience I wanted to code everything all day every day. And I di…

Absolutely this. LLM assistance means we can work faster, and that we can build things that previously weren't feasible given the available time and resources. Which makes the hardest problem in software even harder: what should we build ? It doesn't matter how fast you can move if you're consistently solving the wrong problems.

"AI has made coding the easy part. The hard part now is product management", said Andrew Ng.
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