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

singpolyma3

I think I'm just too opinionated to go there. If I see something that works fine, but isn't the way I'd do it, it doesn't matter if a human or an LLM wrote it I'm still in there making it match my vision.

rolymath

Simon, Just piggy backing on this post since I'm early: Would love to see your take on how the AI and Django worlds will collide.

QuantumNomad_

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 find even human generated code anymore on the internet. Makes me want to just give up programming forever and never use a computer again.

lenerdenator

> I know full well that if you ask Claude Code to build a JSON API endpoint that runs a SQL query and outputs the results as JSON, it’s just going to do it right. It’s not going to mess that up. You have it add automated tests, you have it add documentation, you know it’s going to be good. > But I’m not reviewing that code. And now I’ve got that feeling of guilt: if I haven’t reviewed the code, is it really responsible for me to use this in production? Answer: it wholly depends upon what management has dictated be the goal for GenAI use at the time. There seems to be a trend of people outside of engineering organizations thinking that the "iron triangle" of software (and really, all) engineering no longer holds. Fast, cheap, good: now we can pick all three, and there's no limit to the first one in particular. They don't see why you can't crank out 10x productivity. They've been financially incentivized to think that way, and really, they can't lose if they look at it from an "engineer headcount" standpoint. The outcomes are: 1) The GenAI-augmented engineer cranks out 10x productivity without any quality consequences down the line, and keeps them from having to pay other people or 2) The GenAI-augmented engineer cranks out 10x productivity with quality consequences down the line, at which point the engineer has given another exhibit in the case as to why they should no longer be employed at that organization. Let the lawyers and market inertia deal with the big issues that exist beyond the 90-day fiscal reporting period. Either way, they have a route to the destination of not paying engineers, and that's the end goal. If you don't like that way of running a software engineering organization, well, you're not alone, but if nothing else, you could use GenAI to make working for yourself less risky.

gabriela_c

Claude often does things in more detail, and even better, than I would, in the first pass. But I don't understand how anybody stands comments generated by an LLM? It's seriously the thing that worries (and bothers) me the most. I almost never let unedited LLM comments pass. At a minimum. Most of the time, I use my own vibe-coded tool to run multiple GitHub-PR-review-style reviews, and send them off to the agent to make the code look and work fine. It also struggles with doing things the idiomatic way for huge codebases, or sometimes it's just plain wrong about why something works, even if it gets it right. And I say this despite the fact that I don't really write much code by hand anymore, only the important ones (if even!) or the interesting ones. Also, don't even get me started on AI-generated READMEs... I use Claude to refine my Markdown or automatically handle dark/light-mode, but I try to write everything myself, because I can't stand what it generates .

jcgrillo

> It used to be if you found a GitHub repository with a hundred commits and a good readme and automated tests and stuff, you could be pretty sure that the person writing that had put a lot of care and attention into that project. I think this highlights a problem that has always existed under the surface, but it's being brought into the light by proliferation of vibeslop and openclaw and their ilk. Even in the beforetimes you could craft a 100.0% pure, correct looking github repo that had never stood the test of production. Even if you had a test suite that covers every branch and every instruction, without putting the code in production you aren't going to uncover all the things your test suite didn't--performance issues, security issues, unexpected user behavior, etc. As an observer looking at this repo, I have no way to tell. It's got hundreds of tests, hundreds of commits, dozens of stars... how am I to know nobody has ever actually used it for anything? I don't know how to solve this problem, but it seems like there's a pretty obvious tooling gap here. A very similar problem is something like "contributor reputation", i.e. the plague of drive-by AI generated PRs from people (or openclaws) you've never seen before. Stars and number of commits aren't good enough, we need more.

hirvi74

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 their current state, but what about 5 years, 10 years, ..., 50 years from now? I just cannot help be feel a sense of nihilism and existential dread. Some might argue that we will always be needed, but I am not certain I want to be needed in such a way. Of course, no one is taking hand-coding away from me. I can hand-code all I want on my own time, but occupationally that may be difficult in the future. I have rambled enough, but all and all, I do not think I want to participate in this society anymore, but I do not know how to escape it either.

zarzavat

Perhaps I've missed a few weeks worth of progress, but I don't think that AIs have become more trustworthy, the errors are just more subtle. If the code doesn't compile, that's easy to spot. If the code compiles but doesn't work, that's still somewhat easy to spot. If the code compiles and works, but it does the wrong thing in some edge case, or has a security vulnerability, or introduces tech debt or dubious architectural decisions, that's harder to spot but doesn't reduce the review burden whatsoever. If anything, "truthy" code is more mentally taxing to review than just obviously bad code.

_jss

This is a timely observation and feels right to me. I needed to get a relatively simple batch download -> transform -> api endpoint stood up. I wrote a fairly detailed prompt but left a lot of implementation details out, including data sources. Opus 4.7 built it about 90% the same way I would, but had way more convenience methods and step-validations included. It's great, and really frees me up to think about harder problems.

xienze

> And that feels about right to me. I can plumb my house if I watch enough YouTube videos on plumbing. I would rather hire a plumber. I don't buy this argument at all. I think if we could pay $20/month to a service that would send over a junior plumber/carpenter/electrician with an encyclopedic knowledge of the craft, did the right thing the majority of the time, and we could observe and direct them, we'd all sign up for that in a heartbeat. Worst case, you have to hire an experienced, expensive person to fix the mess. Yes, I can hear everyone now, "worst case is they burn your house down." Sure, but as we're reminded _constantly_ when we read stories about AI agent catastrophes -- a human could wipe your prod database too. wHy ArE yOu HoLdInG iT tO a DiFfErEnT sTaNdArD??? The business side of the house is getting to live that scenario out right now as far as software goes. Sure you've got years of expertise that an LLM doesn't have _yet_. What makes you think it can't replace that part of your job as well?

mohsen1

I am experimenting with writing en entire TypeScript compiler[1] with AI assistant. I've spent 4 months on it already. It might not be successful at the end of the day but my thinking is that if LLMs are going to write a lot of the code I better learn how this can and can not work. I've learned a lot from this project already. I think we're still in charge of design and big ideas even if all of the code is written by AI [1] https://github.com/mohsen1/tsz

etothet

Vibe Coding (and LLMs) did not create undisciplined engineering organizations or engineers. They exposed and accelerated them. Plenty of engineers have loose (or no!) standards and practices over how they write coee. Similarly, plenty of engineering teams have weak and loose standards over how code gets pushed to production. This concept isn't new, it's just a lot easier for individuals and teams who have never really adhered to any sort of standards in their SDLC to produce a lot more code and flesh out ideas.

criddell

Agentic engineering? That reads to me a little like amateur oncologist. How are you defining engineering ? Can agentic engineers adhere to a similar code of ethics that a professional engineer is sworn to uphold? https://www.nspe.org/career-growth/nspe-code-ethics-engineer...

bhagyeshsp

> The thing that really helps me is thinking back to when I’ve worked at larger organizations where I’ve been an engineering manager. Other teams are building software that my team depends on. > If another team hands over something and says, “hey, this is the image resize service, here’s how to use it to resize your images”... I’m not going to go and read every line of code that they wrote. The distance of accountability of the output from its producer is an important metric. Who will be held accountable for which output: that's important to maintain and not feel the "guilt". So, organizations would need to focus on better and more granular building incentives and punishment mechanisms for large-scale software projects.

devin

> 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.

zuzululu

Vibe coding is just coding now. Writing assembly used to be a thing too until higher and higher languages were created. LLM is like that except it compiles English to code. This scares lot of professionals understandably.

causal

As agents get better at code we trust them to produce more of it. There are still bugs to find, but the haystack gets bigger. So the number of bugs to find remains constant but the amount of code to review scales with the capability of the agent.

drfloyd51

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.

dataviz1000

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 bug will corrupt any downstream code. The coding agents don't and can't do this. They keep that bug or malformed architecture as they continue. The instinct is to get the coding agents to stop at these points. However, that is impossible for several reasons. Instead, because it is very cheap, we should find the first place the agent made a mistake and update the prompt. Instead of fixing it, delete all the code (because it is very cheap), and run from the top. Continue this iteration process until the prompt yields the perfect code. Ah, but you say, that is a lot of work done by a human! That is the whole point. The humans are still needed. The process using the tool like this yields 10x speed at writing code.

tyyyy3

Correct me if I’m wrong Simon, but weren’t you highly optimistic about llm’s and agentic-use of them? I believe this is a common fault of not being able to zoom out and look at what trade offs are being made. There’s always trade-offs, the question is whether you can define them and then do the analysis to determine whether the result leaves you in a net benefit state.