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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

#81

Post by skybrian »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #52

Have you noticed that the coding agents get really close to the solution on the first one shot and then require tons of work to get that last 10% or 5%? If we shift the paradigm of how we approach a coding problem, the coding agents can close that gap. Ten years ago every 10 or 15 minutes I would stop coding and start refactoring, testing, and analyzing making sure everything is perfect before proceeding because a bu…

I tend to get something working and refactor my way out, which does work and you can use a coding agent to do it, but it takes time. Maybe starting over would have been better, but I didn’t know what I wanted the architecture to look like at the beginning.

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

#82

Post by kashyapc »

devin wrote: post #39

> If you can go from producing 200 lines of code a day to 2,000 lines of code a day, what else breaks? The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code. And now it doesn’t. It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.

[flagged]

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

#83

Post by mcmcmc »

jazzypants wrote: post #67
ilikebits wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOC is useful here not because it's a metric for output but because it's a metric for _understandability_. Reviewing 200 lines is a very different workload than reviewing 2000.

That's assuming the 200 lines are logical and consistent. Many of my most frustrating LLM bugs are caused by things that look right and are even supported by lengthy comments explaining their (incorrect) reasoning.

Ok? No one is saying that all LOC are equal. Ceteris paribus, 2000 lines is 10x more time consuming to review than 200

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

#84

Post by deadbabe »

adtac wrote: post #63
devin wrote: post #39

> If you can go from producing 200 lines of code a day to 2,000 lines of code a day, what else breaks? The entire software development lifecycle was, it turns out, designed around the idea that it takes a day to produce a few hundred lines of code. And now it doesn’t. It is so embarrassing that LOC is being used as a metric for engineering output.

LOC is the worst metric for engineering output, except for all the others - Churchill

The amount of times an engineer says what the fuck while reading code still seems like a reliable metric for code quality assessment.

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

#85

Post by switchbak »

sesky wrote: post #58
devin wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wishful thinking. The force of the market is "number go up". Quality increasingly has less and less of a role in the equation. You will eat your slop, and you will like it. It will be the only choice you have.

But the quality of code was already very bad due to market forces. Most code at large companies is notoriously poor despite the talent density, because the incentives are not there to tackle tech debt or improve code quality. With such a low baseline, there is an optimistic perspective that LLMs could improve the situation. LLMs can produce excellent code when prompted or reviewed well. Unlike human employees, the mo…

The same incentives that discourage good code in pre-AI times are still dominating now. You will be pushed to ship sub-par products in the future, just like you were in the past.

AI certainly has the potential to make the underlying code/design a lot cleaner. We will also be working with dramatically more code, at a much higher rate of change. That alone will be a big challenge to keep sustainable.

The ones making the decision to under-invest on design are either are unaware of the real costs, or are aware and are deliberately choosing that path - that's not new, and I don't expect it to change.

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

#86

Post by tuom1s »

drfloyd51 wrote: post #49

It is pure arrogance to expect that machines will never be able to code as good as a skilled human. And AI generated code should be different than human code. AI has infinite memory for details. AI doesn’t need organizational patterns like classes. Potentially AI can write code that is more performant than any human. Will it look like garbage? Sure. Will the code be more suited to the task? Yes.

What will happen when AI companies increase the price of tokens?

The code produced will only be understandable by AI. You could use locally hosted LLMs, but it won't be as performant as AI run by big guys. And there is nothing stopping greedy companies implementing some ridiculous pattern that only their model can reasonably work with.

So what you'll do in situation when you can't understand "your" codebase and you have to make changes or fix a bug?

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

#87

Post by tyyyy3 »

devin wrote: post #29
jimmyjazz14 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case market forces would likely favor hand written code and all the slop will be forgotten (unless the slop works fine and is stable).

This is wishful thinking. The force of the market is "number go up". Quality increasingly has less and less of a role in the equation. You will eat your slop, and you will like it. It will be the only choice you have.

I agree generally but there are periods where creative people show up and a whole slew of existing firms go bust/shrink due to one’s ability to envision a path toward creative destruction.

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

#88

Post by cortesoft »

hirvi74 wrote: post #20

I'd be lying if I said I was not worried about the future. I am not necessarily worried in the sense that there will be some grave, impeding doom that awaits the future of humanity. Rather, I just feel like I have to constantly remind myself of the impermanence of all things. Like snow, from water come to water gone. Perhaps I put too much of my identity in being a programmer. Sure, LLMs cannot replace most us in the…

If you work in any new technology field, the chances that your job will exist in the same way 50 years from now is very small.

The job, as you have done it at least, was also not here 50 years before you started doing it.

Did you have any of the same feelings knowing that you were doing a job that has not existed in the world very long? That seems like a strange requirement for a meaningful job, that it should remain the same for 50+ years.

In truth, our world and what we do for our careers is entirely shaped by the time that we live in. Even people that ostensibly do the same thing people have done for centuries (farmer, teacher, etc) are very different today than 100 years ago.

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

#89

Post by toraway »

cj wrote: post #22
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…

> Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again. LLMs aren’t the first thing to come along and change how people develop applications. You had the rise of frameworks like Django, Rails, etc. Also the rise of SPAs. And also the rise of JS as a frontend+backend language. In a 3-5 yeats we’ll have adapted to the new norm like we have in the past

Or, it could be like asbestos and the immediate benefits are just too appealing to listen to arguments of skeptical naysayers about some vaguely defined problems that are decades away, if they even happen.

I use AI tools daily (because they feel like they're helping me) but it's not exactly hard to imagine scenarios where an explosion of slop piling up plus harm to learning by outsourcing all thinking results in systemic damage that actually slows the pace of technological progress given enough time.

History of new technologies tend to average into a positive trend over a long enough time scale but that doesn't mean there aren't individual ups and downs. Including WTF moments looking back at what now seems like baffling decision-making with benefit of hindsight.

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

#90

Post by lbrito »

cj wrote: post #22
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…

> Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again. LLMs aren’t the first thing to come along and change how people develop applications. You had the rise of frameworks like Django, Rails, etc. Also the rise of SPAs. And also the rise of JS as a frontend+backend language. In a 3-5 yeats we’ll have adapted to the new norm like we have in the past

The difference between writing assembly code and Ruby code is much smaller than the difference between programming and vibe coding.

Also, companies are pressuring employees towards adoption in novel ways. There was no such industry-wide pressure by employers in the 90s, 2000s or 2010s for engineers to use a specific tech.

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