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Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

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Re: Vibe engineering

#661

Post by zwnow »

ako wrote: post #617
agentultra wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the cost of faults is much higher than getting a new bookshelf from IKEA. When talking about craftsmanship I’m not talking about artisanal, hand crafted source code that is aesthetically pleasing. Nobody but programmers care. I’m talking about CVEs that allow RCE on your phone so that authoritarian governments can exfiltrate your contact lists and arrest all of the people they suspect of participating in prot…

I don´t see why industrialized software development with AI Agents could not be better at quality. Medical equipment or airplane safety requirements validations are also done in an industrialized manner. We don't really care if engineers working on these products like what they are doing or they feel like a craftsman.

These have standards, software is the wild west?

Re: Vibe engineering

#662

Post by throw234234234 »

samiv wrote: post #563
agentultra wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pe…

Industrialization actually helped the middle class insofar as you needed "skilled workers" to work the industrial equipment, make decisions, and process. The fact that production had scaled in a world of scarcity meant that your worker had greater leverage. They often knew each other as well, went to the same schools, etc which meant less info asymmetry as to their worth/value. It moves the value to something that takes time, skill and sometimes luck to achieve that being skills and experience. This was hard to replicate (e.g. our school, college, university systems), required significant training and created "pets not cattle" with hard to get skills meaning the new skilled middle class could rise and exercise their new found negotiating power.

Somewhat unprecedented in human history. All because intelligence had scarcity. AI changes that.

AI is the real dream of the capital classes. It makes intelligence cheap potentially undoing the very thing that gave birth to the last century's middle class. In the long term, given current trends, I wouldn't be surprised if these AI technologies revert us back to most of human history -> where the world is very unequal, meritocracy dies and most of us are trying to just exist/survive whilst the capital holders have abundance. It explains the large valuations as well of AI/Tech lately and the weird deals going on; this isn't a game of economics anymore; its an arms race of power in the new world structure. I suspect to these people no amount of money is enough; if you win you win for the next era of humanity.

Re: Vibe engineering

#663

Post by oblio »

s_dev wrote: post #322
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 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. Tools always empower those with knowledge further than those without knowledge.

Check out all those "empowered" veteran coal miners.

Re: Vibe engineering

#664

Post by numismatically »

simonw wrote: post #392
llamatastic wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get the idea that LLMs somehow create value. They are burning value. We only get useful work out of them because they consume past work. They are wasteful and only useful in a very contrived context. They don't turn electricity and prompts into work, they turn electricity, prompts AND past work into lesser work. How can anyone intellectually honest not see that? Same as burning fossil fuels is great an…

> How can anyone intellectually honest not see that? The idea that they can only solve problems that they've seen before in their training data is one of these things that seems obviously true, but doesn't hold up once you consistently use them to solve new problems over time. If you won't accept my anecdotal stories about this, consider the fact that both Gemini and OpenAI got gold medal level performance in two ext…

"they output strings that didn't exit before" is some hardcore, uncut cope

Re: Vibe engineering

#665

Post by agentultra »

oblio wrote: post #625
agentultra wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you think about it, Luddites were the original victims of capitalist propaganda.

Exactly. Most people who haven’t studied the history think the Luddites smashed the machines because they were against progress and industrialization. Hence the modern interpretation of Luddite meaning, “against technology.”

Many Luddites were shot against the wall or jailed. History often lies because it is written by the winners.

Re: Vibe engineering

#667

Post by holbrad »

hollowturtle wrote: post #348
computerex wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Good lord I wish I could have as many certainties as well, one point at a time: * There is no objective reality, there isn't one in physics, it's just a non argument * "LLM's help a damn lot in speed of development" That may be your experience and my whole point was arguing that speed may not matter * "Genie is out of the bag, you have to go with the flow, adapt or else" I choose else if this the apex of the argument

I'm genuinely baffled by the assertion that there isn't objective reality.

Re: Vibe engineering

#668

Post by cjenkins »

joenot443 wrote: post #458
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…

> that is the kind of mentality that pushed subpar products on the web for so many years Famously, some of those subpar products are now household names who were able to stake out their place in the market because of their ability to move quickly and iterate. Had they prioritized long-maintainable code quality rather than user journey, it's possible they wouldn't be where they are today. "Move fast and break things"…

Total side note, it's interesting seeing "Move fast and break things" become the dominant phrase vs what I remember initially as the "MIT vs New Jersey methods". Both describe the same thing where fast and sloppy wins vs slow and clean.

Re: Vibe engineering

#669

Post by simonw »

saberience wrote: post #657
simonw wrote: post #2

Just added this note to the end, as part of my justification for picking such an obviously stupid term for this: > I’ve tried in the past to get terms like AI-assisted programming to stick, with approximately zero success. May as well try rubbing some vibes on it and see what happens.

Question, why is it seemingly so super important for you to coin a term for this? Especially a term which comes across as so demeaning and devaluing to engineers (like me and yourself!) I absolutely do not want my non-engineer friends and colleagues think I am "vibe engineering", it sounds trivial and dumbs down the discipline. I personally believe being an engineer of some kind requires work, learning, patience, dis…

I don't think you should call yourself a "vibe engineer" because you use AI tooling, just like I don't think you should call yourself a "continuous integration engineer" if part of your job role occasionally involves configuring GitHub Actions.

But the act of working on GitHub Actions could be referred to as "continuous integration engineering", just like the act of figuring out how best to build software engineering processes around LLM tools could be called "vibe engineering".

Re: Vibe engineering

#670

Post by hollowturtle »

gwbas1c wrote: post #613
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…

> why do we need all these unit tests in the first place? The same reason we've always needed them: 1: They prevent regressions. (IE, bugs in features that were shipped and already working.) 2: They are very easy to run at the push of a button in your IDE. (But in this context the LLM runs them.) 3: They run in CI. This is an important line of defense in making sure a pull request doesn't introduce a bug. Now, depend…

Thanks for the non solicited lesson, I learned basically nothing new. That unit tests ships bug free software is such an overstatement... Btw please go re read my comment and try to understand what I was actually trying to argue about, and I also wrote that I think they can be useful...
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