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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

#941

Post by robotresearcher »

gspr wrote: post #928
robotresearcher wrote: post #917

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The language has well-formed expressions with no defined meaning in terms of machine instructions. My claim is that this is a reduction in precision compared to assembly language. Grandparent said: > The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise. C overtook a more precise language family because it has features other than precision that people cared about. Perhaps a better tradeoff…

Could you please explain why you feel that having UB makes C less precise than asm? To me, the notion of precision isn't in any way related to whether any given statement is sound. It's about the behavior of the language for sound programs.

There are syntactically well-formed C programs that are not sound programs because their behavior is undefined. Or, rephrasing: a subset of all parseable C programs contain 'do whatever, I dunno'. I interpret this as a lack of precision.

One could take the position that specifying precisely 'do whatever, I dunno' counts as perfectly precise. But then a language that was entirely UB would count as precise, which would be an odd position to hold, since you can't specify any behavior at all with it.

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

#942

Post by [deleted] »

gspr wrote: post #927
robotresearcher wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically we almost entirely moved from ASM to C, a language with lots of undefined behavior, because precision is not the most valued feature of languages.

When I say "best part of any programming language" I obviously mean "best part of the in-spec defined parts of any programming language". Your suggestion that because languages have specified undefined behaviour, they are somehow not precise, makes little sense.

[deleted]

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

#943

Post by robotresearcher »

gspr wrote: post #927
robotresearcher wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically we almost entirely moved from ASM to C, a language with lots of undefined behavior, because precision is not the most valued feature of languages.

When I say "best part of any programming language" I obviously mean "best part of the in-spec defined parts of any programming language". Your suggestion that because languages have specified undefined behaviour, they are somehow not precise, makes little sense.

It's the existence of UB that is the reduction in precision. A language without UB is more precise, in my view, than one that has UB. I don't know if this a conventional view. But being able to write parsable, compiler-receivable code that does 'uh, whatever', feels like a reduction in precision to me compared to a language that does not have that property.

Otherwise, we're just saying that the precise parts of the language are precise, which isn't much of a differentiator since it's similarly true for all languages.

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

#944

Post by BowBun »

galkk wrote: post #313
BowBun wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The heavy users of Claude at my job disagree (me included), our work gets shipped and the quality has increased by all metrics. Are you talking about enterprise or consumer Claude subscriptions? I think they're serving drastic different quality depending on how much $ you fork up.

I don't see much sense to have hn as support thread, but here are quotes from my single claude investigation session, and that happens in every claude code session that I have, especially with 4.7 * The first agent's claim that was 3.x-only was wrong * is nice-to-have but doesn't target our exact case as cleanly as the agent claimed. * The agent's "direct fix for yyy" is overstated. * not 57% as the earlier agent cla…

Much like Windows threads with people experience strange bugs without knowing any of their workloads and tools, it's impossible to say. We've got a team of 30 using it full time, and as a member of end leadership I would be hearing if it was constantly missing expectations. It did take iterations to get here, as with everything.

Some of the usual suspects when people are getting bad results: * Overbloated claude.md, it should not contain everything, it should be a table of contents pointing to other files * Max effort - why? Overthinking on simpler tasks results in degraded quality, much like in humans. * You speak of your single session but with agents reviewing other agent outputs. Without knowing your goal and your prompt, and what the agents had access to, my first inclination is that the initial request was vague, a bunch of unnecessary info was returned, and your review step caught that extra jank.

I'm not gonna bother making the joke you allude to, but every single employee I've worked with in person has had glaring holes in their setups which, once solved, dramatically reduced stuff like what you're talking about.

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

#945

Post by bulbar »

robotresearcher wrote: post #917
bulbar wrote: post #902

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UB is about edge cases that a compiler should not be enforced to check against and an occurrence is always a bug. You don't necessarily need a precise description of the actual faulty behavior.

Right. The language has well-formed expressions with no defined meaning in terms of machine instructions. My claim is that this is a reduction in precision compared to assembly language. Grandparent said: > The single best feature of any programming language is that it is precise. C overtook a more precise language family because it has features other than precision that people cared about. Perhaps a better tradeoff…

I don't completely follow the analogy, but I do follow the argument. High precision regarding the requirements often is not needed and that's exactly where LLMs shine.

That's also where engineers come into play. They (and often only they) can judge how much precision is needed depending on the part of the system they are working on.

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

#947

Post by dzjkb »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #897
dzjkb wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI can write 2000 lines faster than you, but you can write the 2000 lines correctly first shot faster than having AI do 10 iterations on these 2000 lines with your guidance to finally get it right I know that a better plan could mean fewer iterations, but again that extends the time you need to spend on that plan => the total time of the AI solution

Right but those 10 iterations only take up prompt writing time. When the agent is executing I move onto other tasks in parallel. AI is faster when you parallelize your work flow.

prompt writing and parsing the AI output, and thats still work you have to do - not sure why you bring up parallelism since you cant do other things while you're writing the prompts

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

#948

Post by threethirtytwo »

dzjkb wrote: post #947
threethirtytwo wrote: post #897

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but those 10 iterations only take up prompt writing time. When the agent is executing I move onto other tasks in parallel. AI is faster when you parallelize your work flow.

prompt writing and parsing the AI output, and thats still work you have to do - not sure why you bring up parallelism since you cant do other things while you're writing the prompts

Other agents can be working while you're writing prompts.

Let me put it more explicitly. For one project I have 10 folders clones of the same project on my local computer. Each one of those folders is responsible for working on a different ticket/feature. I prompt one folder, move on to the next. It takes practice to get used to this style.

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

#949

Post by gspr »

robotresearcher wrote: post #941
gspr wrote: post #928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please explain why you feel that having UB makes C less precise than asm? To me, the notion of precision isn't in any way related to whether any given statement is sound. It's about the behavior of the language for sound programs.

There are syntactically well-formed C programs that are not sound programs because their behavior is undefined. Or, rephrasing: a subset of all parseable C programs contain 'do whatever, I dunno'. I interpret this as a lack of precision. One could take the position that specifying precisely 'do whatever, I dunno' counts as perfectly precise. But then a language that was entirely UB would count as precise, which would…

Nobody seriously interprets "the C programming language" as "parseable C". Of course there's parseable, undefined C, and of course it's very imprecise. It's not relevant.

Now consider sound, in-spec C. Versus natural language.

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

#950

Post by jplusequalt »

gchamonlive wrote: post #814
lvales wrote: post #765

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't addicts chose to stop with their addictive behaviour? And this isn't an excuse btw, but if you want to understand why, this is a good place to start.

If they don't want to, go for it. I'm all up for the freedom to choose your poison, as long as it doesn't restrict someone else's freedom of choice (like jumping off a building and landing on someone, killing you both). What I'm saying is that if you recognize booze is bad for you, but you don't do anything about it because heck there is a billion dollar industry behind it, everyone drinks and you'll die anyway, IDK…

>there is a billion dollar industry behind it, everyone drinks and you'll die anyway, IDK it seems to me like it's mostly your fault

This is an absurd statement. What good is the willpower of a single human in the face of a billion dollars of capital aimed at a society with a penchant for drinking?

People are not isolated systems. We live in a society.

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