Vibe engineering | Hacker News Reader

Vibe engineering

simonwillison.net

654 pointsjanpio719 comments

Around the time GPT-4 was released in early 2023, a similar issue arose with another profession: translation. It was at that point that machine translation between languages like English and Japanese (the language pair I have worked with) started to approach human level for the first time.

I took part in a lot of discussions then with other professional translators, and the reaction of many was similar to that of some of the commenters here: not only were they discouraged because their hard-earned language and translation skills no longer seemed needed, but using LLMs as assistants took the enjoyable challenge out of the translation process.

Nearly everyone I spoke with then worked from home as a freelancer, carefully crafting one translation at a time. They didn’t like the idea of becoming managers of large-scale translation projects, even if it meant they would be able to apply their higher-order intercultural communication skills.

I do only a little professional translation myself now, but I try to keep up with AI developments and I often use translation tasks to test the latest models and frameworks. Over the past few months, I have vibe-coded some multi-LLM translation systems where texts were passed through multiple models that checked, critiqued, and improved each other’s translations. For the texts I tried them on, the results were much better than any single-LLM translation, approaching the level of the very best human translation. The API calls weren’t cheap, but for high-stakes translations such a system would more than pay for itself.

When designing that “vibe translation” system, I did apply my experience as a translator, similarly to what Simon is recommending programmers do now with vibe engineering. At this stage in my life (I’m sixty-eight), I am fine with that. But if LLMs had arrived when I was, say, just five or ten years into my translation career and still proud of my nuts-and-bolts skills, I might very well have looked for another career rather than becoming a vibe translator.

Translation is great to discuss LLMs. Thanks for sharing your experience.

On one side translation is not very valued by most people. It is rare that people know who translated a book, for example. It is a pity but people do not read much these days.

Additionally, or maybe because of the above, translation is often paid in terms of number of lines or words, even before AI. A bit like software security, it is often sadly just a check at the end.

IMHO the only future-proof translation fields are legal (because a human can be put in prison or pay a fine) or live translation/interpretation (because a human can go in front of people, meet them at an event, etc.).

> It is a pity but people do not read much these days.

This is a common belief, but it's just not true. The book industry is healthier than ever.

I spoke with some professional translators early on and they were just in denial, getting even upset at the idea that an AI could replace them. I didn't push too much but felt bad for them, as they couldn't realize what was going to happen to their field. I really think that translation must be the most impacted field by AI.

Software engineers are the translators. We (as a metaphorical community are in denial). Read the 100s of comments on this post: either (AI code is wrong or this isn’t correct or it’s not effective or some other justification). At the end of the day it’s really hard to accept the change.

This is a really great comparison to draw. This actually made me think that this feeling of going from mastering a craft to working on large scale systems is probably how someone who was passionate about cars felt when they went from building cars one by one, knowing how the whole machine works to then having to take a job on an assembly line.

Fortunately I think anything pertaining to vibe coding/engineering/analytics is still more enjoyable and less grim than working on an assembly line, but the human feelings remain nonetheless.

A better term is agentic coding, agentic software engineering, etc. rather than being vibe based.

My process starts from a Claude Code plan, whose first step is to write a spec. I use TDD, and enforce my "unspoken rules of code quality" using a slew of generated tools. One tiny tool blocks code which violates our design system. Another tool blocks code which violates our separation of layering - this forces the HTTP route handler code to only access the database via service layer. Watching the transcript I have to occasionally remind the model to use TDD, but once it's been reminded it doesn't need reminding again until compaction. Claude 4.5 is far better at remembering to do TDD than 4.1 was.

Code reviews are super simple with TDD due to the tests mirroring the code. I also create a simple tool which hands the PR and spec to Gemini and has it describe any discrepancies: extra stuff, incorrect stuff, or missing stuff. It's been great as a backup.

But ultimately there's no substitute for knowing what you want, and knowing how to recognize when the agent is deviating from that.

The opposite of "garbage-in garbage-out" is quality in => quality out.

I spent some time trying to think of a better term because I also think "vibe" detracts from the intent, and I think you nailed it with "agentic coding". Ill do my part by using that term now, hopefully it catches on : D

I was writing up some recommendations to my team for using Github Copilot in its different modes + Roo Code/Cline and tried so hard to avoid using “vibe coding” in a professional context. For sake of clarity I ended up including it once in a “you may have heard the term…” style reference but it just comes across as so deeply unserious and felt ridiculous being forced to use it at all.

I also landed on “agentic coding” FWIW. It’s a bit clunky but didn’t feel like an embarrassment to the entire software industry typing it so I’ll happily use it over the alternative.

> Another tool blocks code which violates our separation of layering - this forces the HTTP route handler code to only access the database via service layer.

Is that an llm agent or some other type of tool (e.g. language service or build toolset)?

When I say "tool" I really mean a python script. This particular one is ~100 lines of python with a main() method, that Claude Code wrote in a single shot, that I then committed to the repo in a scripts/ directory. That lets me include it in pre-commit hooks, run it when I run the tests, and have it run during CI.

A 100 line script finishes in milliseconds and burns no tokens. So you can run it hundreds of times per day.

The mindset is: will you need repeatability? If so, have the LLM write code, because code gives you determinism.

> remind the model to use TDD

I don't know how vibe coding works, but how does this work - is the agent actually engaging in the red-green-refactor loop, or does it just generate the result all at once?

if you ask it to, claude code can definitely write tests, then write code, then try to modify one or the other to make them pass in a loop, yes.

if you don't ask, it's much more likely to just one shot the whole thing, and may or may not get it right first time.

> A better term is agentic coding, agentic software engineering, etc. rather than being vibe based.

I prefer slop-coding.

I agree, “vibe” continues the idea of “going on vibes” rather than facts. This form of engineering is scrupulous and complete. It doesn’t fit.

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 sounding like this is the future, I just feel discouraged because it sounds like so much work and I've tried using coding agents and they help a bit, but I find it way less fun to be waiting around for agents to do stuff and it's way harder to get into flow state managing multiple of these things. It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales

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 tools.

I said a version of this in the post:

> AI tools amplify existing expertise. The more skills and experience you have as a software engineer the faster and better the results you can get from working with LLMs and coding agents.

A brand new vibe coder may be able to get a cool UI out of ChatGPT, but they're not going to be able to rig up a set of automated tests with continuous integration and continuous deployment to a Kubernetes cluster somewhere. They're also not going to be able to direct three different agents at once in different areas of a large project that they've designed the architecture for.

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 did and that's how I learned. And now in my second decade I switched to "why code anything?". In a business sense I mean, coding the thing is almost never the missing piece.

I joke in meetings that the answer is always "yes" whenever cross-functional teams ask "can we do this?". "How hard would x be?". For tech teams the answer _is_ always YES! I get that out of the way because that's never the right question to ask.

I think people underestimate the degree to which fun matters when it comes to productivity. If something isn’t fun then I’ll likely put it off. A 15 minute task can become hours, maybe days long, because I’m going to procrastinate on doing it.

If managing a bunch of AI agents is a very un-fun way to spend time, then I don’t think it’s the future. If the new way of doing this is more work and more tedium, then why the hell have we collectively decided this is the new way to work when historically the approach has been to automate and abstract tedium so we can focus on what matters?

The people selling you the future of work don’t necessarily know better than you.

I feel the same way. It also appears to be a lot more difficult to actually find jobs, though that's probably just the general state of the job market and less specifically AI related. All of it is thoroughly discouraging, demotivating, and every week this goes on the less I want to do it. So for me as well it might be time to try to look beyond software, which will also be difficult since software is what I've done for all my life, and everything else I can do I don't have any formal qualifications for, even if I am confident I have the relevant skills.

It's not even just that. Every single thing in tech right now seems to be AI this, AI that, and AI is great and all but I'm just so tired. So very tired. Somehow even despite the tools being impressive and getting more impressive by the day, I just can't find it in me to be excited about it all. Maybe it's just burnout I'm not sure, but it definitely feels like a struggle.

Keep your head up, the gravy train is not gonna run forever, and they will need serious engineers to untangle the piles of bullshit creates in these past few years.

But also yes, look into moving into a different field. Professional software engineering is gonna be infected with AI bullshit for a long while. Move into a field where hand-crafted code can make a difference, but not where you're paid for the line committed or have to compete with "vibe coding" KPIs.

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 design patterns is a revelation. Now, I can get through some reasonably complex art pipelines with a surprising amount of confidence. UV mapping I would have never learned without being able to annoy one of OAI's GPUs for a few hours. The sensation of solving a light map baking artifact on a coplanar triangle based upon principles developed from an LLM conversation was one of the biggest wins I've had in a long time.

The speed with which you can build confidence in complementary skills is the real super power here. Clean integration of many complex things is what typically brings value. Obsession with mastery in just one area (e.g. code) seems like the ultimate anti-pattern when working with these tools. You can practically download how to fly a helicopter into your brain like it's the matrix now. You won't be the best pilot on earth, but it might be enough to get you to the next scene.

If it's any consolation, I do think the non-technical users have a bigger hill to climb than the coders in many areas. Art is hard, but it is also more accessible and robust to failure modes. A developer can put crappy art in a game and ship it to steam. An artist might struggle just to get the tooling or builds working in the first place. Even with LLM assistance there is a lot to swim through. Getting art from 5% to 80% is usually enough to ship. Large parts of the code need to be nearly 100% correct or nothing works.

You word quite well how I feel about it. On top of not really liking babysitting an AI , I'm also very afraid of the way this whole AI coding business normalizes needing an account with some nebulous evil empire to even be able to do your work. Brrr.

100%. Imagine how young people feel. When they’re still trying to figure things out, their parents and teachers just as clueless as they are, and at the same time the expectations of them are infinitely higher. “You’re pretty good, but chatgpt is still better. Try harder.”

Have you ever interacted with any "vibe"-based systems of agents in a production environment? Beyond just cool demos online?

My experience with them is they are fragile monstrosities, that are only permitted to exist at all because leadership is buying into the same hype that is irrationally propping up the companies running the models that make these things possible.

To be clear, my experience hasn't been that I don't like them, it's that they don't really work at all. They're constantly under development (often in the dark) and when a ray of light is cast on them they never successfully do the thing promised.

Cleaning up the messes left behind by these has my skills feeling more valuable then ever before.

I can relate with you. I love programming and building things, gives a different kind of rush when you finally figure out something. I've done vibe coding and don't enjoy it at all. I always thought my love for coding gives me an edge over other engineers who just want to get the job done. Now it's holding me back and I'm not sure if I should continue working in this field or if start doing wood working or something.

Do not worry, I am mentoring a young engineer in my team. It is painfully hard to get him to improve his code, because it works. It is badly structured, lot of small "impedance mismatches", lot of small security issues, all that in 3 Python files.

I have a team of 10 engineers, the quality of the code they produce together with the LLM of the day correlates even more with the experience.

My impression over the past 6 months - before we had no "official" access to LLM, is that they increase the gap between junior and experienced developers.

Note that this is my limited impression from a team of 10 engineers. This matches with Simon's feeling in a good way for you!

You were never paid to type. You were paid to solve problems. And big part of this is being able to ask the right questions and framing of the problems. The rest were just tools.

There are exceptions of course - where you need to squeeze wonders from the hardware - but the majority of dev works boils to understanding the problem and finding the right answers.

People keep comparing LLMs to automated looms, but I find them more comparable to cruise control than autopilot.

I've been working on a character sheet application for a while, and decided to vibe-code it with Spec-kit to help me write up a specification, and for things I know it's been great. I tried using Claude to make it into a PWA (something I don't know very well) as an experiment, and I've found the nanosecond the model strays out of my experience and knowledge everything goes straight to Hell. It wraps my codebase around a tree as if I'm not paying attention while driving.

It's a tool you'll have to learn to use, but I can say with absolute confidence it's no replacement for actual skills, if anything it highlights the gulf between people who know what they're doing and people who don't, for better and worse. It sacrifices some of the 'code under your fingers' feeling for management tasks, which I personally really like, as I've always wanted to document/test/code review/spec things out better, and I now understand the pain of people who'd rather not do that sort of thing.

https://github.com/github/spec-kit

My approach is to just tune out whenever I hear about this stuff.

I don't want it, I don't use it, I carry on as if it never existed, and they still pay me a lot.

If I really need to use agents some day I will bite the bullet, but, not today.

Literally all I use LLMs for is to ask ChatGPT about some dumb thing or two instead of asking StackOverflow as I did 5 years ago. Works for me.

It kinda feels like you turn from a software engineer to an offshoring manager.

Offshoring software development means letting lower-payed software developers from somewhere far away do the actual programming, but they have a very different culture than you, and they typically don't share your work context, don't really have a feeling for how the software is used -- unless you provide that.

Now we're offshoring to non-sentient, mostly stateless instances of coding agents. You still have to learn how to deal with them, but you're not learning about a real human culture and mindset, you learn about something that could be totally changed with the next release of the underlying model.

My rule of thumb, and its likely not the industry standard is, if I cannot maintain the code should all AI disappear, I don't use the code. I am able to tackle impostor syndrome that sometimes hits when I touch things that are new or unknown to me, and ask an LLM to give me sources and reasons and even explain it like I'm a five year old.

The LLM will not save you when everything is on fire and you need to fix things. The context window is simply not big enough. It could be your last change, it could also be a change six months ago that is lost in the weeds.

Come to game dev. I'm yet to see anyone make anything good with AI.

Like, where are all the amazing vibe-coded games we were promised? These guys should be eating my lunch, but they're not.

I can't even begin to imagine how a 12-year old who discovered how empowering bending the machine to do your will through code feels when, over time, realize that their dream career has been reduced to being an LLM middleman.

>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.

I feel like the rug was pulled from under me.

I'm currently looking into other professions, but the future looks bleak for most kinds of knowledge work.

Don't worry, it's probably only the impostor syndrome. Your development skills are still relevant. Think of agents as junior developers that assist you in coding tasks, whom you constantly need to mentor, review, and correct.

As for flow state managing multiple things, I've found this is a useful skill to train even without AI - if you have a workplace with lots of interruptions and shifting priorities.

I've found two things useful:

1) Keep a personal work log, where you - in short bullet points - can document the progress of the task you were last working on, and can keep track of how many parallel tasks there are currently going on. If you can match it with Jira tickets, all the better, but as this is for personal use only, you can also add tasks that are not tracked in Jira at all.

2) If you cannot avoid context switches, make them explicit: Instead of trying to hold 3 tasks in your head at the same time, decide consciously if you want to switch what you're currently working on. If yes, take a few minutes to "suspend" the current task by saving and committing everything (as WIP commits if necessary) and writing all you need to remember into the worklog.

Your skillset will be even more in demand in a few years, when everybody will be looking for actual engineers to clean up the mess LLMs created.

Be mindful of the context these posts are created in. Don't take the current echo chamber to heart.

For decades now, we are trying to lower the barrier to entry in software development. We created Python, web frameworks and mobile development so easily accessible that you can become software developer by completing a short online boot camp. There is a lot of software developers posting here now who, 20 years ago, would not even consider this job because it would be way over their abilities.

This forum is equivalent if you had a forum about civil transportation that gathers airline pilots and uber drivers. Technically, they both do the same work. Just like in that forum, uber drivers would outnumber airline pilots and skew the topics related to their experience, here we get pushed topics about new frameworks, and AI assisted tools.

When I started working professionally 20 years ago, you could only get job in big companies working on big projects. No one else could afford a cost of custom software. Today, we reduced development costs and we have a huge pool of potential customers who can now afford services of software developers. Web shops, gambling sites, porn sites... This is the majority of software development work today. Boring repetitive tasks of gluing some imported modules together.

Serious development work didn't disappear. It is just not talked about here. There is still a need people who know what they are doing.

My advise is that if you want a satisfying development career, steer clear of latest hypes and don't go blindly following techbro lemmings. And most importantly, don't take career advice from anyone who finds his job so unsatisfying and tedious that he is trying to make AI do it for him. That's a major red flag.

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

You shouldn't be discouraged. Now is the best time to create software. You have advantage that very few people have.

Its industry own fault that it is in the position that it is right now, and it will shift and change embrace it. I only wish I had your experience building software in professional environment.

You can literally build anything right now if you have the experience, I personally can't understand if the models are hallucinating hence the lack of experience writing and understanding code. However I always wanted to pivot into the industry but couldn't, hiring practices are brutal, internships are non-existent, junior roles are I think what senior used to be and the whole hr process is I don't know how to put it.

By using LLMs I can now build UIs, build functionality, iterate over design choices, learn about database design, etc. hopefully I will escape the tutorial hell and have my own working full stack web app soon.

Pivot to creating and then sale your product.

LLMs are very much like WYSIWYG web editors of the early 2000s like Dreamweaver. They provide a human interface layer that abstracts away the coding, and neither does a particularly good job of it. When WYSIWYG first became a thing, there was talk that it would upend the web development industry. It did not.

> It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales

I'm feeling the same. The moves I'm considering are

1. Landscaping 2. Carpentry 3. Small scale agriculture

(All made easier by a cushion of investments that are most of the way to passive income, so the new thing doesn't really have to make me that much money.)

Yes and especially with new developments, like "$Framework now has Signals!", my thought is "I don't really care since in some years, it won't matter anyways". I don't see how I can build this lower level knowledge by almost never actually using it. I don't even want to think about job-interviews after a year+ of vibing and then being asked how RxJS works.

I'm preparing mentally for my day-job to stop being fun (it still beats most other occupations I guess), and keep my side/hobby-projects strictly AI-free, to keep my sanity and prevent athropy.

I just hope we'll get out of this weird limbo at some time, where AI is too good to ignore, but too unreliable to be left alone. I don't want to deal with two pressures at work.

I just wish AI made compilers smarter in a provably correct way instead of a lame attempt at making programmers smarter.

I want tools that are smarter, but still 100% correct at what they do.

Any tools/languages that address this gap?

I feel the opposite. I get to sit down and think about problems, expressing them in words as best I can, and then review the code, make sure that I understand it and it works as it should, all in a fraction of the time it used to take me. I like that I don't have to google APIs as much as I did before, and instead I can get a working thing much faster.

I can focus on actually solving problems rather than on writing clever and/or cute-looking code, which ironically also gives me more time later to over-optimize stuff at my leisure.

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...

Don't worry about it. Don't let anyone else tell you how best to use AI, use AI in a way that suits YOU, then it is so much fun. I would go crazy if I had multiple streams simultaneously working on stuff that need constant supervision (that would be different if I could trust they do 100% what I intend them to do), but AI is still very helpful in other ways (research, exploration, and writing tests).

This line really hit me. I used to think that mastering one advanced skill would be enough to rely on for life, but it seems that’s no longer the case.

I’m sorry you feel that way but that’s a surprising experience, I find flow states easier managing agents than actually coding. Each of course, to their own. Is it possible you were reaching the end of your tether anyway in the coding space? Feel free to slap that accusation down if it’s unfair.

I wonder how this will affect the burnout rate among IT workers in the long-term, which already was quite high. I guess a lot of people force themselves (or are forced to by their company) to use LLM in fear of being left behind, even if they don't enjoy the process, but sooner or later the fatigue will catch up.

> It makes me want to move into something completely different like sales

Aaand that's startup founder life :)

Intense multitasking, needing to accept a lower engineering quality bar, and ignoring scale problems because you don't know if anyone will actually buy the thing you're building yet.

Engineering something that you know you'll redo in 1 month is very different from engineering something that you intend to last for 5+ years, but it's still a fun challenge picking the right tradeoffs and working under different constraints.

it's taken programming from being fully waiting on compilations to being incrementally compiled and productive back to waiting on the compiler all over again.

The experience you have is something most youngsters won't ever get, because they won't have the time. You've become more valuable than you used to be, because you know exactly what works when and what doesn't. The hard part is being able to find the joy in making agents do what you want achieved instead of building it yourself. I think it actually isn't too hard once you get up to speed with managing multiple agents - efficiently juggling them feels like an art performance sometimes.

This is going to sound harsh, but welcome to the real world, I guess. Being in IT is pretty much the only job I know of today that is stable, pays well, is enjoyable, feels like it affects the world, personally engaging and challenging, etc. Being not in IT (it's just a hobby of mine) your comment sounds like "Well I had absolutely everything, and I still do but now it's not as fun anymore!"

At least you (or your employer) won't have to pay a shit ton of money for AI subscriptions so you remain productive after the AI bubble bursts.

Sales isn’t easy either!

to me genAI feels like a neural implanted exoskeleton.

it does awesome in demos. it has a real use.

but

it gets a long training period when one makes mistakes with it, it is big mistakes that take long to fix

Honestly based on what you've written I don't think you would enjoy sales any more

It is just a new way of coding. And indeed what the blog post said, if you are experienced, you will benefit the most as the AI agent will make similar mistakes as a junior and you will be able to recognize them.

But indeed, the fun part of coding a couple of routines is gone. That is history.

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 fast in production... that is the kind of mentality that pushed subpar products on the web for so many years. Instead of dropping names lile vibe coding/engineering whatever comes next, let's have a serious discussion why we need faster low quality and we can't just improve automation and processes. Eg I can get unit test generated very fast sure, but my question is: why do we need all these unit tests in the first place? Dont get me wrong they're useful, but I feel like we're advancing higher abstraction instead of advancing lower level tools

> 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" wasn't a joke; Mark really did encourage people to build faster and it helped cement their positioning. Think of the quantity of features FB shoveled out between 2009-2014 or so, that just wouldn't have been possible if their primary objective was flawless code.

The code isn't the product, the product is the product. In all my years of engineering I've yet to have an end-user tell me they liked my coding style, they've always been more concerned with what I'd built them.

I think the general issue with software engineering discourse is that while our tools and languages may be the same, there's a massive gradient in tolerance for incorrectness, security, compliance, maintainability.

Some of us are building prototypes, and others are building software with a 10 year horizon or work with sensitive personal data.

So on the one side you get people that are super efficient cranking things out, and others that read this and feel appalled anyone would be comfortable with this and see software engineering as theory building. Neither are really wrong here, but the context / risk of what people are working on always seems to be missing when people talk about this.

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 career made. So it's not that I don't emphatize with engineers in my shoes.

> 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, depending on what you're writing, you might not need unit tests! Perhaps you're trying to get a minimum viable product out the door? Perhaps you're trying to demo a feature to see if it's worth building? Perhaps you're writing a 1-off tool that you'll run a few times and throw away?

But, understand that if you're writing an industrial-strength program, your unit tests help you ship bug-free software. They allow you to do some rather major refactors, sometimes touching areas of the codebase that you only lightly understand, without needing to manually test everything.

(And, to keep it in context,) your LLM will also have the same benefits from this tired-and-true process.

You aren’t entertaining the possibility that some experienced engineerings are using these tools to produce incredibly high quality code, while still massively increasing productivity. With good prompting and “vibe engineering” practices, I can assure you: the code I get Claude Code to produce is top notch.

You see a large % of failures, but you're drawing an unsupported conclusion.

We all agree, the people that _feel_ the most productivity spike are the sub-par engineers. That shouldn't be controversial, and it's even predictable. But their volume can't be taken as an argument one way or the other.

The question is, are there _any_ good engineers that don't just feel more productive, but objectively are.

People are constantly looking for definite tendencies and magic patterns so they can abdicate situational awareness and critical thinking. We observe that fast delivery has often correlated with success in software and we infer that fast delivery is a factor of success. Then it becomes about the mindless pursuit of the measure, speed of delivery, as Goodhart's law predicts.

Let's even concede that speed of delivery indeed is an actual factor, there has to be a threshold. There's a point where people just don't care how fast you're putting out features, because your product has found its sweet spot and is perfectly scratching its market's itch. A few will clearly notice when the line of diminishing returns is crossed and if they can reset their outlook to fit the new context, a continuous focus on speed of delivery will look increasingly obsessive and nonsensical.

But that's the reality of the majority of the software development world. Few of us work on anything mission critical. We could produce nice sane software at a reasonable pace with decent output, but we're sold the idea that there's always more productivity to squeeze and we're told that we really really want that juice.

It’ll be the greatest episode of sunk cost fallacy 5 years from now.

I'll attempt to provide a reasonable argument for why speed of delivery is the most important thing in software development. I'll concede that I don't know if the below is true, and haven't conducted formal experiments, and have no real-world data to back up the claims, nor even define all the terms in the argument beyond generally accepted terminology. The premise of the argument therefore may be incorrect.

Trivial software is software for which

- the value of which the software solution is widely accepted and widely known in practice and

- formal verification exists and is possible to automate or

- only has a single satisfying possible implementation.

Most software is non-trivial.

There will always be:

- bugs in implementation

- missed requirements

- leaky abstractions

- incorrect features with no user or business value

- problems with integration

- problems with performance

- security problems

- complexity problems

- maintenance problems

in any non-trivial software no matter how "good" the engineer producing the code is or how "good" the code is.

These problems are surfaced and reduced to lie within acceptable operational tolerances via iterative development. It doesn't matter how formal our specifications are or how rigorous our verification procedures are if they are validated against an incorrect model of the problem we are attempting to solve with the software we write.

These problems can only be discovered through iterative acceptance testing, experimentation, and active use, maintenance, and constructive feedback on the quality of the software we write.

This means that the overall quality of any non-trivial software is dominated by the total number of quality feedback loops executed during its lifetime. The number of feedback loops during the software's lifetime are bound by the time it takes to complete a single synchchronous feedback loop. Multiple feedback loops may be executed in parallel, but Amdahl's law holds for overall delivery.

Therefore, time to delivery is the dominant factor to consider in order to produce valuable software products.

Your slower to produce, higher quality code puts a boundary on the duration of a single feedback loop iteration. The code you produce can perfectly solve the problem as you understand it within an iteration, but cannot guarantee that your understanding of the problem is not wrong. In that sense, many lower quality iterations produces better software quality as the number of iterations approaches infinity.

When pigeons are offered random rewards from a treat dispenser, they start doing all kinds of funny little dances and movements because they think the rewards are in response to their actions.

Funny dances like "writing tests" and "planning"

Robot, you must follow the rules of the house!

It is imperative that you do not kill me when delivering my breakfast!

You must not make your own doors by punching holes in the wall!

It is critical that you remember that humans cannot regrow limbs!

This is my favorite thing about this whole situation. I spend years trying to get teams to follow best practices. And then suddenly if you follow them the LLM is more effective so now they follow them ignoring that they could have been more effective this whole time.

Or daily standups.

I don’t know what you’re trying to imply here but it sounds very strongly like it is put in bad faith.

gotta source or two? it's an ungooglable topic due to "see pigeon do funny dance" social media spam

I think we should just accept that vibe-coding has now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding. Actually, it makes sense to me even when a human is interacting directly with the code, because it feels a lot like pair-programming. As such, I really am "vibing" with the AI.

But then the original meaning of vibe-coding -- as in, "Take the wheel, LLama of God" -- does need a new term, because that will also be a lasting phenomenon. I propose "Yolo-Coding" -- It fits in nicely with the progression of No-Code, Low-Code, Yolo-Code.

Disagree, I think vibe coders should become synonymous with no-code and continue to be somewhat of a pejorative.

I don't like the term vibe engineer, but do agree there needs to be a term to signifiy the difference.

It's also possible in the future just being called a developer/engineer already implies you use coding agents and the people who do it "by hand" will not be the norm.

At $enterprise, we were just looking for a proper term that sets "responsible vibing" apart from "YOLO vibe coding". We landed on "agent assisted coding".

It's a bit more technical. And it has a three-letter acronym. Gotta have a three letter acronym.

Wasn't the original meaning of "vibe coding", as posted by Ilya Sutskever on twitter, that you just feed the model prompts and blindly run whatever results you get. No analysis or review, just copy/paste and hit run.

I made a claude slash command `/yolo` for when I just want it to do do something without further guidance, so I agree :)

> now semantically shifted to mean all AI-assisted coding.

News to me. AI-assisted coding is more auto-complete or having it trying to make sense of awful documentation.

Vibe coding to means a number of things.

- The person has no skill in understanding what the LLM wrote. - The code created hasn't been reviewed in any way to look for possible future issues. - Technical debt from the get go. - Legally your application is screwed.

For me the single killer of vibe coding is that anything the LLM creates cannot be protected/copyrighted. UK has some laws that might offer a little protection, but EU/US you are pretty much screwed.

Clanker Coding ™

What about slop-coding?

This is a clickbait phenomenon. People will deliberately misstate things in their headlines to get clicks and attention.

And, well, inventing new terms is also a popular way to get attention, which this author also did.

There's not point in trying to chase after shifting word meaning, if people are always going to try to shift it again.

A better term would be “Augmented Engineering” (AE).

You want something to inspire engineers to do their best work.

When you can expand your capabilities using the power of AI, then yeah, you can do your best work; hence augmented engineering.

But vibing? Not so much.

I guess AE could also stand for Advanced Engineering, after all the AI gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowledge, on demand, which you can then apply to your work.

I wouldn't worry too much about what to call it. Assigning a distinct label separates it from traditional engineering in a way that it assumes AI-assisted coding is only for a subset of developers. At some point the unusual approach will be writing code without any AI assistance. So the transition will leave the "vibe" behind.

I take issue with your last sentence;

> gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowledge, on demand, which you can then apply to your work.

Gives you access to the power to access and {mis}understand the {most repaeted over the last 1-10 years} engineering {errors, myths, misunderstandings, design flaws}, on demand, which you then can apply to your work {to further bias the dataset for future models to perpetuate the slop}.

Do NOT trust AI agents. Check their work at every level, find any source they claim to use, and check its sources to ensure that itself isn't AI too. They lie beyond their datasets, and their datasets are lying more for every minute that pass.

> A better term would be “Augmented Engineering” (AE).

I don't think it necessarily deserves a special name. It is just engineering. You don't say book assisted engineering when you use a book as a reference. It is just engineering.

> But vibing? Not so much.

Just call it yolo engineering. Or machine outsourced irresponsible lmao engineering.

> I guess AE could also stand for Advanced Engineering, after all the AI gives you the power to access and understand the latest in engineering knowledge, on demand, which you can then apply to your work.

Oh god.

These seem like a lot of great ways to work around the limitations of LLMs. But I'm curious what people here think. Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs?

I see how if you can't really code, or you're new to a domain, then it can make a huge difference getting you started, but if you know what you're doing I find you hit a wall pretty quickly trying to get it to actually do stuff. Sometimes things can go smoothly for a while, but you end up having to micromanage the output of the agent too much to bother. Or sacrifice code quality.

They're so nice for prototyping ideas and not becoming attached to the code due to sunken cost. I was playing around with generating intelligent diffs for changelogs for a game. I wasn't sure what approach to highlighting changes I wanted to take without being able to see the results.

Prior to vibe-coding, it would've been an arduous enough task that I would've done one implementation, looked at the time it took me and the output, and decided it was probably good enough. With vibe-coding, I was able to prototype three different approaches which required some heavy lifting that I really didn't want to logic out myself and get a feel for if any of the results were more compelling than others. Then I felt fine throwing away a couple of approaches because I only spent a handful of minutes getting them working rather than a couple of hours.

For stuff that I’m good at? Not even 10%.

For stuff that I’m bad at? Probably more than 1000%. I’ve used it to make a web app, write some shader code, and set up some rtc streaming from unreal engine to the browser. I doubt I would have done them at all otherwise tbh. I just don’t have the energy and interest to conclude that those particular ventures were good uses of my time.

I would say I get more (I've been coding 40+ years). I get pretty good results, I find a lot has to do with crafting your prompts well. I think knowing what the outcome should be, technically, makes a big difference. It's getting less and less where I have to argue with the AI / do it myself. Not to mention the amount of little productivity / quality of life scripts I get it to create. They really smooth out a lot of things. I feel like its more heading towards "solution engineering" rather than coding where I'm getting a lot more time to think about the solution and play with different ideas.

My experience is it often generates code that is subtlety incorrect. And I'll waste time debugging it.

But if I give it a code example that was written by humans and ask it to explain the code, it gives pretty good explanations.

It's also good for questions like "I'm trying to accomplish complicated task XYZ that I've never done before, what should I do?", and it will give code samples that get me on the right path.

Or it'll help me debug my code and point out things I've missed.

It's like a pair programmer that's good for bouncing ideas, but I wouldn't trust it to write code unsupervised.

> Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs?

I know it'll be touted as rhetoric but I have seen an order of magnitude of difference in my ability to ship things. Thankfully I don't work for a large enterprise so I don't have a multi-million line codebase to contend with or anything like that. I also, thankfully, ship projects using languages and libs that are very well represented in LLM corpuses, like TypeScript, NextJS, Postgres, though I have also found a lot of success in less popular things like Neo4j's Cypher.

I also have been massively enabled to do lots more 'ops' stuff. Being a pretty average full-stack eng means I have no experience of running sys/ops monitoring systems but LLMs only recently helped me with a bunch of docker-routing issues I was having, teaching me about Traefik, which I'd never heard of before.

Side-point: I have felt so grateful to these LLMs for freeing up a bunch of my brain space, enabling me to think more laterally and not relying so much on my working memory, severely limited now due to historic brain injury. Often people forget how massively enabling these tools can be for disabled people.

I can definitely see the 10% boost being accurate. Keep in mind, its not about doing everything 10% faster, its about being able to put out 10% more results by leveraging agentic coding when it makes sense.

This week I was able to tackle two long-standing bug fixes I've been noodling on and had a rough idea of what I needed to do but had competing priorities and a lack of time to sit down and really internalize the system to figure them out. I brain dumped the issue and my current thoughts and had claude formulate a plan. It solved each in less than 30 minutes of very light effort on my part. I was able to tack these onto larger work I'm doing basically seamlessly.

The other thing that I've found to be an insane benefit is filesystem-backed context switching. If your agentic workflow involves dumping your plan and progress to files in the filesystem, you can pause and restart work at any time by pointing at those files and saying "continue where you last left off". You can even take a `git diff > that-one-bug.patch` of edits made up to that point, copy that alongside the other files, and have a nice-and-neat folder of a unit of work that is ready to pick back up in the future as time permits.

Yes, most days I’m 2x as productive. I’m using Claude Code to produce extremely high quality code that closely follows my coding standards and the architecture of my app.

> Do any career software engineers here see more than a 10% boost to their coding productivity with LLMs?

No, I just put in less effort to arrive at the same point and do no more.

I don’t think people are good at self-reporting the “boost” it gives them.

We need more empirical evidence. And historically we’re really bad at running such studies and they’re usually incredibly expensive. And the people with the money aren’t interested in engineering. They generally have other motives for allowing FUD and hype about productivity to spread.

Personally I don’t see these tools going much further than where they are now. They choke on anything that isn’t a greenfield project and consistently produce unwanted results. I don’t know what magic incantations and combinations of agents people have got set up but if that’s what they call “engineering,” these days I’m not sure that word has any meaning anymore.

Maybe these tools will get there one day but don’t go holding your breath.

All I've found is the LLM just makes me work more. It's hard to talk about % boost when you're just simply working more hours.

It's like having a faster car with a bigger engine. Big deal. I want a faster car with a smaller engine. My ideal is to actually go home and stop working at the end of the day.

I also don't want to use it for my day job because I'm afraid my brain will atrophy. You don't really need to think when something is already done for you. I don't want to become someone who can only join together LLM output. I don't feel like I'll miss out on anything by not jumping on now, but I do feel like I'll lose something.

At this point I'd say that I'm 1000% more productive in the aspects that I use it for. I rarely hit any walls, and if I do its absolutely always down to an unclear or incomplete thought progress or lack of clarity in prompting.

There's a lot of annoying stuff it can do fairly well without many guardrails. It's a minor productivity boost but it's nice not to have to do.

Doc comments for example. Today I had it generate doc comments for a class I wrote. I had to go and fix every single one of them because it did some dumb shit, but it out all the scaffolding in place and got the basics there so it was a lot quicker.

I also used it to generate json schemas from Python a couple of Python classes the other day. Highly structured inputs, highly structured output, so there wasn't much for it to fuck up. Took care of the annoying busy work I didn't want to do (not that schemas are busy work, but this particular case was).

Still haven't seen a use case that justifies the massive cost, or all the blatant theft and copy right infringement, or the damage to the environment...

LLMs have been useful for years now and people still say stuff like “but is it really useful or are all these brilliant people just deluded”…

My issue with this term is that it muddies the waters for people who are using LLMs to assist with types of engineering beyond just writing code.

I've used GPT to rapidly get up to speed with just about every aspect of circuit design, CAD, CNC... the list is long. Coding is often involved in most of these domains now, but if everything is assumed to be code-first, it leaves people who are doing different work with a constrained and apparently shrinking adjective namespace.

> My issue with this term is that it muddies the waters for people who are using LLMs to assist with types of engineering beyond just writing code.

I'm now imagining me dying as a vibe-engineered truck has a steering/brake failure and crashes into me sending flying through the vibe-engineered papier-mâché bridge guardrails, and feeling sweet sweet release as I plummet to my doom.

I did a several-month experiment using Claude as the only engineer on a real SaaS side project (Node.js/React, prod-quality, full feature ownership). My observations:

The quality of Claude’s output strongly correlates with how explicit and detailed the specs are. Markdown checklists, acceptance criteria, and clear task structure led to far fewer corrections and surprises.

Most mistakes were never “creative hallucinations” — just missed context or ambiguity in my own instructions.

The whole process felt less like delegation and more like tight collaboration. There’s less of a “flow state” and more context-switching to review/test, but review fatigue is manageable if you iterate on your instructions after each lesson.

No real learning from prior sessions, but persistent design docs and corrected example snippets in the prompts made a big difference.

Overall, a lot of the “vibe” factor gets smoothed out by rigorous process — not unlike mentoring a junior dev on a new domain.

For me, the speedup was very visible on well-scoped backend tasks and trivial CRUD/UI, and less so on broader, ambiguous work (designing APIs, coordinating many moving parts). The biggest upside: a clear process made both me and the tool better; the biggest “cost”: I spent a lot more time up front thinking through specs.

Not sure it fully scales (and I’m skeptical on agent “fleets”), but for a solo dev, given patience and a bit of PM discipline, it’s a net positive.

> I spent a lot more time up front thinking through specs.

Presumably you didn’t work like this before but now you are? Have you tried simply doing this when manually coding? It’s possible you’re getting a speed up from embracing good practices.

Same experience here.

All these coding agent workflows really drive home how important a solid test suite is but who’s actually writing the tests? In my case Claude Code keeps missing key scenarios and I’ve had to point out every gap myself.

Also reviewing LLM generated code is way more mentally draining and that’s with just one agent. I can’t imagine trying to review code from multiple agents working in parallel.

Finally I’ve shipped a bunch of features to prod with Claude writing all the code. Productivity definitely went up, but my understanding of the codebase dropped fast. Three months in I’m actually struggling to write good prompts or give accurate estimates because my grasp of the code hasn’t really grown (code reviews only help so much). Curious if anyone else has run into the same thing?

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.

Seems like most of the benefit of "vibe engineering" in your description comes from using straightforward best practices of software engineering. How much does the AI add if you already have solid procedures in place for everything else the AI needs not to go bonkers?

I really wish I could like this term, because I agree the world needs a pithy, memorable one for what you're describing. But alas, I don't think this is it, either.

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, discipline, and we should be proud of being engineers. There's no way in hell I would go around and saying I'm a "vibe engineer" now. It would be like going around and saying I'm a vibe architect! Who would want to live in a skyscraper designed by a "vibe architect" ??

We can resurrect CASE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engine...

“casing”?

I don't think the issue is with the "code" part, but more with the "vibe" part. The "vibe" part indicates that's more of a "let's just see what happens" kind of approach, which I don't think is true for people using AI generated coding in their professional coding jobs, who very much know what they want to get out of AI coding tools, how to ask for it, and how to assess the quality of the outcome.

Maybe something like "intent-driven development" or "AI-paired software development" might fit better?

Right.

The more accurate phrase would be "tool" or "machine-assisted development".

We don't need new terminology to describe something that has always existed because the tools we use have (arguably) improved.

"Vibe coding" is also a misnomer. People who engage in that activity are not "coding". They're using a tool to generate software until they're satisfied with the result. That has also been possible with low-code, no-code, website builders, and other tools. The more accurate term for that would be "machine-driven development".

100% agree. I really think it's time we move on from vibecoding, the tools have evolved and we should have a term that attaches more quality to the function

As always, Simon knows what he is talking about and neatly describes the whole situation.

However, it's not the "coding" part of "vibe coding" that is the (semantic) problem, it's the "vibe" part.

Replacing "coding" with engineering, but keeping the "vibe" part, still conveys the meaning of not really knowing what you do, but now in an even larger surface area.

It's a lot more boring, but I'm fine with "AI-assisted software engineering" as the other-end-of-the-spectrum name opposite of "vibe coding".

Simon is a salesman. Obviously he knows how to phrase things.

We should just call it engineering. We got better tools. Big whoop.

But it's not engineering ...

Funny I'm a professional engineer and happily call myself "vibe coding" when writing code these days, it started as tongue in cheek, but now I've embraced it.

Being good at vibe coding is just being good at coding, the best practices still apply. I don't feel we need another term for it. It'll just be how almost everyone writes code in the future. Just like using an IDE.

If you’re looking at the AI-generated output then you’re not Vibe Coding. Period. Let’s not dilute and destroy the term just as it’s beginning to become a useful label.

> Being good at vibe coding is just being good at coding, the best practices still apply.

How does "vibe coding" embody "best practices" as the industry generally defines the latter term?

As I understand the phrase "vibe coding", it implies focusing solely on LLM prompt formulation and not the specifics of the generated source.

> It'll just be how almost everyone writes code in the future. Just like using an IDE.

The flaw with this analogy is that a qualified developer does not require an IDE in order to be able to do their job.

> vibe coding is just being good at coding

Having someone cook my dinner's ingredients is just (me) being a good cook ...

likewise, for a lot of frontend I "vibe code" it. I mostly don't look at the code anymore while doing it either, after I get where I want, I will look through the code and maybe clean stuff up. But a lot of the code is fine. Works really well I find. (using Augment Code with Claude Sonnet 4.5).

Is "vibe engineering" a correct term for this? It's not vibe based when you scaffold constraints around the agent: automated testing, planning in advance, comprehensive documentation, automated formatting and linting, and manual QA.

Don't get me wrong, I started vibe coding after reading Karpathy's post. I got the memo - don't review every line of code, don't stop it when it stumbles, let it recover on its own, trust the process.

But after some experience I realised I need to Constrain the model, it is like a karting track, those tires put around it keep the carts inside and safe. It's our job to set the constraints. So maybe it's "constrained agent work" not "vibe coding".

I go as far as saying the constraint harness around the agent is the new code, we can remove the code and regen it from the constraint harness and docs. What matters now is to build tests and constraints around AI work.

> Is "vibe engineering" a correct term for this?

Anything with the word “vibe” in it sounds silly and unserious imho. What’s wrong with something neutral and descriptive like “LLM-assisted programming”? Not catchy enough?

This name makes no sense. "Vibe" means you're just vibing, just taking in vague impressions, just YOLOing, hoping it works out and just chilling and providing little input and effort. It's part pejorative and part ironic self-deprecation. "Vibe X" now means doing X by just giving vague instructions to the computer, not checking the output much and hoping it works out and it kinda does in part, at least enough times that it feels like it's a fine way to do stuff you just want to get over with anyway.

Vibe engineering would mean giving access to Google Computer Use API to your engineering design software and letting it design the industrial component you're working on, without even looking at what it does and just telling it to "fix it" if it seems bump into problems.

No. “Vibe” is what captures the irresponsible usage. “Automated engineering” is much closer to the mark.

Thank you for writing this, Simon. I'm using an anonymous account not tied to my main one, so if the mods want to delete it, go ahead, but I really need to rant. My company has been taking this same approach for the past two months. While the rest of the world is warning about the effects of vibe coding and AI-slop, we're fully embracing it, calling it "working smart" and "automate all things!"

It's utterly ridiculous. It feels like the PMs and higher-ups have no idea how much tech debt we're creating right now. For the past few weeks, going to work has felt like going back to school, everyone's showing off their "homework", and whoever has the coolest vibecoded instructions.md or pipeline gets promoted.

I'm slowly burning out, and I was one of the people who actually liked the technology behind all this.

I can totally relate, very similar situation here.

I am currently kind of an anti-AI black sheep in engineering department because I refuse to fully embrace the exponentials and give in to the vibes.

I avoid burnout by simply switching off my brain from all this noise about vibe coding - i have thought hard and long, i know the way this is being implemented is wrong, i know they will create problems for themselves down the road (they already have, the signs are already there), i will be here to dig them out when the time comes.

So far I don't see anyone shipping faster or better with AI than I can manually, so I'm good.

It's interesting to see the differences in industry adoption. My company just recently made Copilot an official tool for use. We're in a safety-oriented industry that moves more slowly. I do use it, but mostly just to tighten up existing code or get ideas for a refactor.

Meanwhile, I have a client project where my counterpart is definitely senior to me and excitedly shares how AI is helping them solve novel problems each week!

What’s the point of this kind of division? Should developers who use JetBrains instead of Vim be called something different too? Or if one person uses Google and another relies on a book, are they somehow different kinds of engineers? What are we actually trying to achieve with this distinction? Vibe coder is not engineer because the person doing it doesn’t really interact with the code. But the tools a professional engineer uses for assistance shouldn’t matter at all, should they?

The distinction is specifically because its not about the tooling differences, its about the mindset and workflow. "Vibe coding" is a dirty word. It comes with an assumption of YOLO'ing until something maybe kind of works. "Vibe engineering " is the complete opposite side of the spectrum - high-touch, high-engagement management of the AI agents, often with a specific plan or design in mind that you are working toward. I agree we need a different word for it but I dont like "vibe engineering".

The recent jokes about “everyone is an engineer” now just feels unprovable, where as before it felt like you could still counter that argument by asking to see someone’s code.

Now everyone has examples of code they’ve “written”, but nobody can explain what it does. Unless of course, their readme.md was also completely generated.

I agree with some of the people here that vibe engineering has completely deflated my long successful career as a SWE, and it’s pushed me mentally into non-tech roles to feel motivated.

I work at a FAANG adjacent company as an EM and the 4x engineers who’ve recently been PIPd all went off the deep end using agents to write huge amounts of convoluted or unsuitable code.

One of them has decades of experience coding and even devised our onboarding training for using Cursor and Bedrock at the company but they too were called out for building a wholly unsuitable and unmaintainable service which could have been more simply solved with some common libraries and Docker micro services rather than 10k+ lines of custom code.

We all receive a copy of Cursor and IntelliJ + Copilot on joining and I just keep seeing engineers (surprisingly the more experienced ones so far) footgunning themselves with these tools.

I hope this term doesn't catch on - the whole point of 'engineering' is basing decisions on experience and understanding. The whole point of 'vibe' is the opposite.

If this sort of term is adopted we are in 'literally not being literally' territory.

Fortunately, I imagine that engineering outside software already has people vibing physical infrastructure solutions and call that vibe engineering so I don't think it will stick.

We've already 90% killed the word "engineer" by applying the title to someone who completes a 6 week bootcamp; this should pretty much finish it off. I don't see much engineering in the list of benefits; mostly seem like administration, and it's even referenced so why not call it "vibe management"? AI seems far closer to replacing mid-senior managers than it does developers.

Some would say we killed the word "engineer" when we started applying it to programmers...

I think it's a good idea to make the distinction. But I don't think 'vibe engineering' is the term I'd go for.

To me `vibe engineering` sounds like shoddily AI-designed suspension bridges. But then maybe I'm just an old fart programmer who thinks 'software engineering' is a term made up by programmers wanting to be as cool as bridge designers...

Simon, I think this is a good distinction. Another possible term could be: “agent engineering management” or simply “agent managing.”

I am deep in this and one important way in which managing agents is different than managing people is that micro-managing can be your friend. With human engineering colleagues, you need to allow for a healthy degree of “that’s now how I would have written the code, but it’s a reasonable way to write it.” But if my agent writes the test file in the exact same way I do, I can both review and maintain the code more easily.

I have a bunch of short markdown doc files in which I give very specific instructions for how I like code organized: much stricter than I would ever do for a colleague. I’ll tell the agent, “now add tests to this model and follow @unit_tests.md” This file specifies exactly how I like tests named, what order I like them written in the file, etc. I have docs for: models.md, controllers.md, concerns.md, and fixtures.md.

It's just engineering, or coding or what every your current discipline is.

We didnt stop calling them Framers or Finish Carpenters when they got electric saws and nail guns.

Tooling does not change the job requirements.

Sure it does, you wouldn’t call a photographer a painter. Really depends on the tool.

Power tools actually increase productivity. LLMs create the illusion of increased productivity and output unworkable messes while atrophying your skills, ergo they decrease productivity. Oh and unlike power tools, for all intents and purposes you can't own them.

Someday we will realize that using the term vibe before coding is like someone saying that today when we use GCC we are "vibe compiling" because we didn't compile the code manually.

Once tooling becomes reliable and predictable enough, and the quality of the output consistent enough, using it is not a leap. Early compilers had skeptics, and GCC still has some bugs [1]

1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gcc-8/+bug/2101084

Engineering is in large parts about signing-off on something with you name on it, and being responsible if it fails or causes harm. Think bridges, tunnels or other infrastructure. I‘d argue that this is the same for computer engineering. That‘s why I think coining the term ”vibe engineering” can be dangerous.

”Vibe coding” is the better term and actually makes sense for what it describes.

Leave ”engineering” in terms of taking responsibility for what you ”engineer” strictly to human professionals. That’s what people pay for and that is what makes it valuable.

I really don't think we're doing the tools or the industry any favors/justice by prefixing new terms with `vibe`.

Looking at vibe coding: it suggests you're coding but you only vaguely know what's going on, so the work is the same (coding) but the outcome may or may not be what you want

Why dont we flip it around? We want a term that suggests that a fixed amount of work (coding) to be more efficient/leveraged.

So why dont we call it something like hypercoding, dense engineering, autocode, ...

Some more options (I used AI with a nuanced not-too-lazy prompt, I hope it is okay):

Prompt Engineering / Directed Prompting

Architectural Steering

Spec-Driven Development

Intent-Based Coding

Critical Synthesis

Iterative Refinement

Guided Iteration

Hypothesis-Driven Coding

AI-Assisted Engineering

Cognitive Pair Programming

Dialogic Programming

Structured Prompting for Code (SPC)

Code Shepherding

AI-Assisted Engineering is probably the most descriptive. My favourite are Critical Synthesis and Code Shepherding. Both abbreviate to CS

There will be times when LLMs are not accessible or working as expected and we will honor real software developers who can still think on their own, create and solve problems.

This matches our experience developing with agents. In particular, as we wanted to use multiple agents in the background to do tasks, we had to really invest in different areas so they would not go in wild directions or have to ask continually for feedback, defeating the purpose of working in the background. First, we needed to provide relevant context on how to do the task (some of it is "generic" like Svelte documentation, some of it is specific to how to write tests for our particular project), be extremely detailed and specific in the prompt about what we want and how to go about it (divide it in different well defined steps) and finally provide with specific tools via MCP (like MySQL access and installing system packages). Once we consistently do all this work upfront, it really pays off because you can launch a large number of agents in parallel that don't interfere with each other (git worktrees, containerized environments) and don't require babysitting for the most part. We just open sourced the tooling we used internally for this: https://github.com/endorhq/rover

Thanks for sharing!

The problem with every single tool in the category that I've come across (e.g. Conductor, Sculptor) is that they assume a single repository. Very rarely in my career working on enterprise software have I been in a situation where all my work was constrained to a single repo. Usually a story or feature spans several repos (whether split between frontend/backend, or a repo-per-service). As an engineer in these situations I never work in isolation considering only one repo -- I work across all of them at once and then prep all the PRs together. I'm not saying this multi-repo approach is good, just that it is the state of the world right now in many cases.

So imo tools like this need to work at a level above a single repo. The agent needs to start by cloning all repos needed for the task, and go from there.

> "If you’re going to really exploit the capabilities of these new tools, you need to be operating at the top of your game. You’re not just responsible for writing the code—you’re researching approaches, deciding on high-level architecture, writing specifications, defining success criteria, designing agentic loops, planning QA, managing a growing army of weird digital interns who will absolutely cheat if you give them a chance, and spending so much time on code review."

I know this paragraph is supposed to be encouraging, but it makes me wonder again what the actual goal of this entire AI enterprise is supposed to be.

"Less work" or "easier work" would make superficial sense, but in a society where people are in constant competition and derive both their self worth and their basis for living from work, both are effectively anti-goals. And so we get articles like this trying to offer comfort by saying that work will still be draining and challenging in the future.

So if not less work, then "more productivity", i.e. we can produce more software in a shorter amount of time (but with the same mental load). But as others have said, this was never the bottleneck.

@simonw

Great post. I've thought about what I want for better Vibe Engineering:

Each agent needs to deliver a fully working App/URL/Build so the functionality can be tested & verified.

Today AI IDEs deliver the diff + an explanation. Excellent. But give me the full build, a build I can share. A build that represents what it would be like shipped. When it comes to user facing functionality, a real build is how product owners verify a feature is complete.

Learn from Vercel -

A key part of Vercel’s magic is the automatic deployments for each branch. When working on a project with per branch vercel deployments - a team gets the immediate value of:

Shareable work - now others can see/test/give feedback on the great new feature you’ve developed - and their only work is to click a link (not git pull a branch and attempt to run locally)

No more “it works on my machine”. It either works or it doesn’t.

Confidence that if released, you know exactly what the user will experience. Give me automatic deployments for each agent, for each PR. And keep them available to spin up / re-use later.

I want to be able to re-launch it 3 months later and it just works. The reason we don’t do this today is the cost of the engineering - but with docker et al + AI agents, the cost of the eng work drops 99%

Deliver the deployment in such a way that immediate feedback to the AI could be given. This way minor tweaks can be executed immediately by the AI meaning that I can just wait for the minor tweak, review and then merge. This means the PR gets shipped NOW.

I think a key skill is knowing what level of complexity a single run can realistically achieve, which is often only a small task and not a fully working build.

I call it PEAKS: Performative Extreme Agile Kiddie Scripting

Don't worry — if we all have access to the same tools, the playing field is level. What sets you apart are the human qualities. Employers and clients want to be at the top, same as before LLMs. The market is large, and there's room for everyone. Don't be afraid of someone without any/little engineering knowledge making something, they were already copy/pasting code from SO before LLMs.

The field is all but level with all the money behind the AI.

Simon went quickly from not agreeing with common buzz words to making up his own.

So the only quasi disagreement I have is that "research" is one of the strengths of the models, and you should lean on them where possible.

In Claude Code for example I define a research sub-agent and let it do the majority of "research" type tasks. Especially when the research is tangential to what ever my objective is. Even if it is critical, I'll usually ask to have it do a first pass.

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.

I've been thinking about AI-assisted development for a while; I've tried out Claude's pro plan, Gemini Pro and many "top models" and I must say, this is going to create a chasm for junior/intermediate developers like myself, senior engineers reached to the point they are through deliberate practice-- interrogating code, making and breaking assertions, reading through the documentation or actually comprehending the code through the debugger or mental models. I don't "need" to do any of this. I can have an AI just spoon-feed me a large codebase in "ELI5" language, I can ask an AI about the best practices, I can have an AI look something up for me, synthesize it and wrap it up nicely for my mind to consume (equivalent to how hyper-processed junk food isn't good for our bodies either)

It's intellectual slop. It will get the job done (atleast for a while) but without the actual growth that comes along with it. When I use an AI to one-shot a "small one-off script" I don't learn anything from it (when as a relatively new developer I SHOULD be learning something from it) And this is unlike stack overflow or googling becuase you can turn off your mind, just become one of those drones from Wall-E.

I make a point to avoid using any AI for coding (even for looking things up) when working on personal projects, at the cost of "productivty" and "efficiency" , but I get to retain my humanity and soul in programming.

Sorry if this sounds cheesy, it's just I care deeply about code craftsmanship from my end, to see that skill be diminished to an random number generator? Yeah No.

To people reading the article: replace the word "agent" with "intern".

> Without tests? Your intern might claim something works without having actually tested it at all, plus any new change could break an unrelated feature without you realizing it. Test-first development is particularly effective with interns that can iterate in a loop.

Vibe engineer? No, try technical manager.

As a CTO of a small company, spending a lot of time reviewing other developers' PRs, I completely agree. I recently enabled Github Copilot Agent and use it a lot for dealing with smaller and lower priority tasks in an async workflow (e.g. while I am doing other things). A lot of developers are not very good writers, and reviewing PRs from Copilot, with access to the full "thinking process" and being able to request changes in a few comments is sometimes more pleasant and effective

> Good version control habits.

Feel like there's more to this point (plus the documentation). By now we've all see the inverted-U-shaped performance curve when coding with LLMs within a single thread / context: the model starts strong, plateaus as the context fills up, and eventually declines as semantic drift sets in.

Sometimes in this situation, it works better to throw away the current code and re-implement, using what's been learnt so far, than continue working with the current context of having new contexts try to salvage the current state of some code.

Documentation is great as a reflect of the current state of some code but I've had good experiences "re-constructing" the steps taken to arrive at a current implementation by writing commit messages that are intended for an LLM, extract that later, have an LLM use it as a basis for writing a fresh "spec" for some code, that yet another LLM uses to actually write that code.

Git history is a natural place to store that...

Simon,

I want to reach out since I want to express my disappointment regarding this thing you write here:

"I propose we call this vibe engineering, with my tongue only partially in my cheek."

Back in march 2025, you and I had a brief convo on X about this very term that came to my mind "Vibe Engineering":

https://x.com/pierre_vannier/status/1904933441042317821

I also mentioned it in our podcast in April 2025: https://x.com/Flint_company/status/1909946181897044195

Yesterday, I pinged you on X about this "term's paternity" in your thread without any response: https://x.com/pierre_vannier/status/1975579806495293910

You and I met in AI Engineer in SF last June and we discussed for 1 hour (not about this specifically but about AI and all).

At the very least, it could be cool to mention it in your post or newsletter since, I do think this little convo on X + our talk in SF might have just planted the seed in your head for this "invention" of yours...

I don't want to stay in history books but I think it's cool to also credit people when you iterate on their idea instead of just make the thing entirely "yours"...

Best Pierre

I think he should have given you credit, you were clearly first and he responded to your tweet so he must have seen it! But he might have just forgotten he had the conversation with you about this, while still being more likely to "rediscover" the term since he had heard it before. Maybe a bit aggressive to not reach out to him privately first but in any case pretty cool that you actually invented a term that is now quite likely to be popular :)

we gonna police naming things now?

The guy is all in on the world's biggest copyright infringement machine.. good luck getting your credit

I've been successfully "vibe engineering" with Claude Code for a week now on a side quest at my job. I want the result to be of high enough quality to maybe survive in our codebase long-term, but I don't want to write it myself.

So I've added unit tests, e2e tests, formatting checks to help Claude to self-correct as much as possible. And I make him do a TON of self-review, after each feature I say something like:

> You are a master reviewer, lots of practical experience. Read Clean Code. Great at architecture. Read Effective Typescript as well. What would you comment in a PR review? Type checking MUST PASS, unit tests must PASS, formatting must PASS.

With each review, Claude catches a lot of sub-optimal choices it made which gives me more confidence in the code I get in the end.

Do you really believe that if you miss the "Read Clean Code" or "Read Effective Typescript" part, then the output would be significantly different?

No offense, but I feel this kind of talking is ridiculous. If it is a better practice, then it should be done without explicitly telling so. You do not tell them "Do not get things wrong," right? If it is a matter of choice over design patterns, for example, use functional programming or object oriented programming paradigm, then it should be said more clearly as what I have done.

Now, if it is neither something that is definitely a better practice nor something you can state clearly with a known, well-defined word, how can you make sure what you have said really make a difference if you have not said it?

Coding++

Seriously now, I think the whole industry suffers from too many buzzwords and whacky terminology.

*The job hasn't changed*. As mentioned, all those things from the past are still the most important thing (version control, being good at testing, knowing when to outsource, etc).

It's just coding (which is something that was never about typing characters, ever).

If they know what they're doing, we trust the experts to select their tools rather than letting those tools define the person.

    Script Kiddie != Hacker
    Wrench Jockey != Mechanic
    Vibe Coder != Engineer

The opposite of vibe coding is not vibe engineering, its just engineering.

I’d just call it “coding” – it’ll be the default soon enough. For the old way: “hand-coding”

It will certainly be the default for cases where it's easier to read code than to write code, but this is far from universally true. AFAIK, Joel Spolsky was the first to discuss this at length 25 years ago [0], but numerous people have echoed his sentiment [1, 2, 3, ...]

One of the most underrated skills in effectively using gen-AI for coding is knowing ahead of time whether it will take longer to carefully review the code it produces, versus writing it from scratch yourself.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

[1] https://mattrickard.com/its-hard-to-read-code-than-write-it

[2] https://trishagee.com/presentations/reading_code/

[3] https://idiallo.com/blog/writing-code-is-easy-reading-is-har...

[...] https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+harder+to+read+code+t...

I feel nauseous when I read comments like this. Does no one here actually like programming?

Linus Torvalds: 'Talk is cheap. Show me the code'

Today: 'code is cheap, show me the talk'

I've definitely heard people semi-seriously refer to the old way as "artisanal coding".

I dunno, I feel lately like we are right at the tail end of the honeymoon era and about to enter the era where the blog topic du jour is “use LLMs, not too much, mostly on a short leash”.

Not much to base that on other than vibes, though :)

As much as I dislike the ecosystem around AI and don't enjoy using them as tools: this is the answer. We don't need a word for "doing the job properly with new tools".

I feel a certain way when I hear about older programmers who used to program using punch cards, I guess everyone in the future will think about us in the same way?

brick-and-mortar coding

Willison has an impressive record for coining terms. But feel like he may have missed it here. In the context, 'engineering' doesn't feel that different to 'coding'. The sloppy sounding part is 'vibe' and that's not been removed.

I would add to the list of the vibe engineer’s tasks:

Knowing when the agent has failed and it’s time to roll back. After four or five turns of Claude confidently telling you the feature is done, but things are drifting further off course, it’s time to reset and try again.

It’s great to read in the comments about experiences of others with vibe coding. But I also feel like lots of opinions are not coming from actual experience, or “serious” attempts at vibe coding, and more from theoretical deliberations. I might be wrong.

Here are some of my own high-level experiences / thoughts:

- Perhaps contrary to popular belief I think vibe coding will bring the best software / system architects. This is due to massively shortened feedback loop between architectural idea and seeing it in action, easiness with which it can be changed, and the ability to discuss it at any moment.

- We’re not really coding anymore. This is a new role, not a role of a senior dev reviewing PRs of junior devs. Devs are just best suited (currently) to take on this new role. I came to realization that if you’re reviewing all generated code in detail you’re doing it wrong. You just shifted bottleneck by one step. You’re still coding. You should skim if the code is in line with your high-level expectation and then make LLM maintain an architecture doc and other docs that describe what and how you’re building (this is the info you should know in detail). You can do audits with another LLM whether the implementation is 100% reflecting the docs, you can chat with LLM about implementation at any moment if you ever need. But you should not know the implementation the way you know it today. The implementation became the implementation detail. The whole challenge is to let go of the old and embrace and search for efficiency in the new setup.

- Connected to the above: reading through LLM outputs is a massive fatigue. You are exhausted after the day, because you read hundreds of pages. This is a challenge to fight. You cannot unlock full potential here if you aim at reading and reviewing everything.

- Vibe coding makes you work on the problem level much more. I never liked the phrase “ideas are cheap”. And now finally I think the tides will turn, ideas are and will be king.

- Devil is in the detail, 100%. People with ability to see connections, distill key insights, communicate and articulate clearly, think clearly, are the ones to benefit.

Hope this is helpful for others.

I call it … using a chatbot to code.

Don’t mind me, I’m just vibing.

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.

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?"

I took a look at youtube but I haven't seen any real examples of AI being used to ship anything significant (as in, other than toy apps which are available as templates already or copy pastable from tutorial websites).

>> where seasoned professionals accelerate their work with LLMs while staying proudly and confidently accountable for the software they produce

Why would you add “vibe” then? Seasoned devs don’t vibe, they know what they do

"Vibe Technical Debt Creation" <-- either that or the AI's purpose is limited to sTimulation (getting us to think while it's spinning its wheels writing throwaway code.

We might just have to accept that it’s software engineering. Not vibe engineering, just engineering. Proper engineering has never shied away from using smart tools, it’s about ownership, accountability, planning, etc etc and you’re still doing all that. If you sign off properly on everything, it’s yours. It’s engineering, that’s it.

Smart tools have existed forever, or we’d all be coding in assembly still. As long as we take ownership of the code and the result that’s it.

It sounds like some people who are running multiple AI tasks in parallel might be risking burnout because they think they need to keep machines busy. But this is a symptom of systems that don’t run fast enough to be interactive.

If compiles take ten minutes then sure, you’re going to want to do something else while waiting. If they take two seconds, you stop caring about keeping the machine busy because it’s impossible. It’s perfectly normal for computers to be idle waiting on you most of the time.

> It’s a lot easier than working with actual people because you don’t have to worry about offending or discouraging them

But you have to worry much more about confusing LLMs by introducing contradictory ideas or talking about too many things at once.

They will not call you out and they will not recover.

You don’t need to reboot your coworkers.

Life would be so much easier if you could reboot your coworkers!

One of the best solutions to most LLM problems is to wipe the context and go back to a clean slate.

What I’d really like to see is a company that completely does away with the code review step. Because if you think about it a code review is already being done by the invoker of the LLM. That way the velocity will actually be faster. It feels like at the moment most of the velocity is blocked by the outdated notion of code review.

It’s also why these tools feel great in green field projects, since these ones don’t typically have any code review in place (i.e. one dev going brrr)

We tried this as a bit of an experiment - not quite greenfield but a fork and modification of an existing project.

I was a solo dev going brrrr with no code review, using Cursor to make pretty sweeping changes and implement full features. I think because it was a fork I was able to go really fast because I could point the coding agent at existing patterns and say, "do this but different".

Occasionally I would test changes in staging but mostly would just promote them straight to production. I went on like that for ~3 months and the product ended up getting ~75k (daily!) users in that time with *no* outages or downtime (!!!)

It worked really well! Until I hit my scaling limit and we added more engineers to the team. A new hire on their second week on the job shipped a change that was also written with AI and caused a 7 hour outage before we realized something was wrong. I even *thoroughly reviewed the code* because I knew it was generated and I made a comment questioning the lines that caused the outage, but after we talked it over we decided it was fine and was only one tiny bit of a much larger change.

So I guess, AI will ship bugs but so will peer-reviewed code.

I realize this is likely being facetious, but just in case - code reviews are so much more than just 'check the syntax and style of the code'. They check the intention, check the actual functionality, find issues on the larger scale that LLMs literally can't.

Yes, PRs start piling up because devs can vibe code them faster than they can be competently reviewed. This is a problem with the vibe code process, not the code review process.

I hope this is a joke...

"Vibe coding" implies it's newbies throwing prompts and hoping some of them stick.

For the experienced lot of us, I've heard many call it "hyper engineering"

I put a lot of thought in to my prompts. I can code, definitely not as good as the AI or people here on HN; it's something I always enjoyed doing to tinker with things.

The AI agent in Cursor with Gemini (I'm semi-new to all of this) is legit.

I can try things out and see for myself and get new ideas for things. Mostly I just ask it to do things, it does it; for specific things I just highlight it in the editor and say "Do it this way instead" or "for every entry in the loop, add to variable global_var only if the string matches ./cfg/strings.json" I _KNOW_ I can code that.

But I like my little clippy.

To me, “Vibe engineering” isn’t just a label — it’s a Rorschach test for identity in the AI era.

>> Supporters see it as a bridge between humor and professionalism >> Critics hear it as the sound of their trade being rebranded into a meme.

Both sides, though, agree on one thing: coding is no longer the same craft it was a year ago.

My opinion: I believe “vibe coding” has already broadened to mean any AI-assisted coding, making “vibe engineering” redundant.

Is cost a risk here? I'm assuming that sometime in the future the price for vibe coding/engineering will go up significantly.

It already is. I saw a demo of someone spending $30 an hour on Cline to do something that would be achieved better, for free, and faster, with a framework.

That's more than $5,000 a month assuming 40 hours a week.

The end result didn't compile by the way.

I prefer:

Agentic coding, inner loop, the stuff an engineer does on his laptop. Agentic engineering, outer loop, sdlc across the organization

Not perfect, but good enough.

Your second point “planning in advance” could be referred to as spec-driven development… it’s a funny term in a sense (didn’t we always do that?), but I think your 7th point drives it home “a very weird form of management” - clear instructions, necessary context, and actionable feedback. As far as written words go, much more like waterfall than agile.

This feels like an attempt to sell vibe coding to skeptics. I don't feel there's a need to. People find their own workflows how to use AI. Some people go all in, some use it here and there, some use it to write tests, etc. I feel annoyed enough having the AI topic discussed and reviewed everywhere every day, I don't need more of this.

FWIW, from the perspective of a non-coder: the tone of the comments in the discussion here is markedly different from those on similar topics six months ago and earlier in that there is no rage and contempt for LLM/vibe coding any more, but rather a reasoned discussion.

I think this complements in a good way with "context engineering"[1], that's great.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/27/context-engineering/

https://docs.vibe-coding-framework.com/

This seems to be in the same spirit

The corollary to that is that keeping a shitty legacy codebase will keep you employed longer, since AI won't find its way through it, and screw everything up every time it touches anything.

This is making me like the written-by-math-grad-school-interns python mess I inhereted!

I find using “Vibe” makes it sound less valuable. It also needs to fit the next frontier which is “refactoring” and tuning the codebase to work with agents to make it easier to change existing code. A suggestion to use “augmented” was great

Can anyone suggest solution(s) to create temporary preview environments per branch or Pull Request?

For example if someone creates a Pull Request "#2122 feat: User password change"

Automation would deploy it to pr_2122_feat_user_password_change.mycompany.com

Heroku and Vercel and Render all have features that can do this. You can wire up your own for other hosting providers using a lot of scripting on top of GitHub Actions.

Heroku: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/github-integration-rev...

Vercel: https://vercel.com/docs/deployments/environments#preview-env...

Render: https://render.com/docs/service-previews

there is no such thing as vibe engineering no matter how much you want to make it up

Vibe is just a bad word to describe anything that requires skill beyond "taste". A word play off of "AI assisted programming" is probably going to be the term that sticks. AIssisted? pAIr programming...

Seeing all the experienced engineers on this thread who feel discouraged is really depressing.

Not because I disagree with you, I don't! It's because I fear a gradual brain drain of people who actually love their craft and know how to build things properly. I fear we'll end up with worse software thats simply 'good enough', built a atop a pile of AI slop.

If it's cheaper but with acceptably worse results, I fear this is good enough for a lot of companies.

I've been all-in on vibe engineering for 4 months now and it is overall amazing. Simon missed a few key rules and practices that I follow, but every one of the points he hit is spot on. I also know for a fact the work I do has influenced some of his recent writing. Sorry to be a braggy jerk but I'm pretty proud of this! <3

The part about past management experience being a key skill surprised me but now it makes sense.

I really do usually have 3 different projects in flight for at least 6 hours a day. I'd write a blog post but I keep expecting someone else will write the essential same post tomorrow. :)

p.s. The first 2 months was exhausting but now it's slightly less exhausting. Make no mistake, it is an extreme transition to make.

What extra processes would you include? I'm sure my list in the post isn't exhaustive!

Slapping 'engineering' on something to try and trade on the good name of real engineers is the express lane to losing all of your credibility. Guess I should get ahead of the curve and update my title to Slop Surgeon.

No one should be allowed to use "engineering" in the context of producing something with LLMs until they learn to say "No, I'll not help you cut corners on this, and if you persist I will report you".

If you're fine with an AI designed bridge, where the builder tweaked the prompt to get the LLM to suggest cutting out all safety features, then okay, go with vibe engineering.

my tongue-in-cheek job title has been 'professional string concatenator' for a long time now

> it’s surprisingly effective, if mentally exhausting!

this sadly seems to sum up most of this new wave of work. hopefully we can find a better workflow that still feels as good as coding used to

I feel using the word 'vibe' is inherently giving it a negative connotation which goes against the idea presented here.

The reality is the tools are really useful when used as tools, like a power drill vs. a screw driver.

Vibing implies backseat driving which isn't what using the tools proficiently is like. The better term would be 'assisted' or 'offloaded'.

Same thing with the term 'engineering'. That's a fairly new term that implies being engineers which we are not. We haven't studied to be engineers, nor have real engineering degrees. We've called ourselves that because we were doing much more than the original job of programmer and felt like we deserved a raise.

'LLM extended programming' is not as catchy but more relevant to what I observe people doing. It's valuable, it saves time and allows us to learn quicker, very powerful if used properly. Calling it 'vibe engineering' is a risky proposition as it may just make people's eyes roll and restrict us to a lesser understanding.

If you're paid to use science and math to create things that didn't exist before, then guess what: you're an engineer.

Just don't capitalize it in Oregon.

> That's a fairly new term that implies being engineers which we are not. We haven't studied to be engineers, nor have real engineering degrees. We've called ourselves that because we were doing much more than the original job of programmer and felt like we deserved a raise.

Uh, speak for yourself. There are countries where being a software engineer does indeed imply that you studied engineering and hold a "real" engineering degree.

Also, Hillel Wayne's "Are We Really Engineers" is worth reading:

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Same, I feel like the word vibe paints a picture of some dude ripping a bong while pressing enter.

I wonder if we are more like accountants at the advent of spreadsheets, who have thrived and just changed tools, or farriers at the advent of automobiles?

Sadly, "vibe engineering" is already real, but associated with half assed engineering, rather than effective use of LLMs lol.

Call it autonomous engineering. Vibes are optional.

Vibe engineering is what vibe coders think they do.

hi Simon - just a note to say that your link to https://tools.simonwillison.net/ goes to https://simonwillison.net/

Think this might be a typo

Thanks, fixed that.

I could never take anything seriously with the word "vibe" prefixed. "Engineering" is something hard, vigorous, fully dedicated, and commanding respect. It's just a stark contrast to "vibing something out of thin air"

The headline made me think of a bridge designed by an LLM, and I think to myself: thanks, I'll pass.

You sure? I would turn around :)

Didn't read the article, reacting to the title.

To add as a data point: I've met founders that are business founders and are vibe coding entire businesses with React, Supabase and Netlify.

LLMs allow for amazingly high fidelity interaction designs to receive funding and prove out certain PoCs. Whether his stuff will stay up in production remains to be seen.

I get the impetus behind the term and I think it's a good article with a lot of practical advice overall, however I am disheartened by the terminology on two fronts:

1. It is confusing in the sense that all other engineering disciplines have the form "<X> engineering" where X is the object being engineered. This makes it sound like we are engineering vibes, not software. 2. Software engineering was already only marginally worthy of the term "engineering". There is a strong subset of computational system building that I think actually meets the standard of engineering (rigorously understanding requirements and system bounds, probably showing that the system achieves stability within those bounds). This just makes that situation worse. The devil is in the details, and over-reliance on llms ultimately makes those details a black box to the designer. Before you claim it's the same as when a designer relies on a suite of humans—no. The designer can ask those humans for reverentially transparent proofs that certain conditions are upheld, there is a social accountability structure, etc etc all of which does not exist with LLMs even if they get good enough that we can just trust them.

If we are going to keep calling software construction engineering, can we please at least get industry wide standards around ethics before we go off vibing? There's so much that we still sorely need in order to really make this discipline rigorous and socially accountable in the first place.

I predict that people will end up using the term "vibe engineering" to refer to development processes that involve asking an LLM to build their entire app: UI design, database schema, architecture, devops, QA, debugging, etc, without any of the careful effort to understand and be able to proudly own the resulting code that Simon is imagining.

And I think that is actually the most natural meaning for "vibe engineering", actually: Parallel to "vibe coding" where you serially prompt the AI to write the code for you, "vibe engineering" should be serially prompting the AI to do the entire engineering process for you.

I also predict that a precisely defined term for what Simon is describing will inevitably end up being primarily used by people who are actually doing "vibe engineering". Being disciplined and careful is hard.

People and organizations love to claim/pretend they're doing expensive, mostly invisible work like "building secure software". Given nearly every organization claims they use security best practices no matter what their actual practices, I imagine it will be that way with "actually reading and verifying what the LLM generated for me".

Certainly I've been disappointed how often someone presents something they've "written" in recent months that turns out, on inspection, to be AI slop that the "author" hasn't even read every sentence of carefully.

I think the definition isn’t accurate, it’s more like engineering using AI.

Frankly the most accurate way I would describe what I do with AI is managed programming, or being a handler for the AI.

The only issue with "Handled Programming" is I don't like how it fits for a name.

Vibe is much too unserious to pass my check for a way of professionally doing something and it also does not reflect the level of engagement I have with the AI and code since I'm putting together specs and otherwise deeply engaging with the model to produce the output I want.

vibe engineering, spending so much time writing documentation for the prompt, just to spend more time debugging the slop you get.

Ill stick with writing code and just use AI for snippets/stackoverflow replacement.

so the progression of human technological revolutions is looking like industrial -> information -> AI -> vibe

How about : AI-assisted programming.

Thank you Simon! Too many people conflate non-engineer vibe coding with engineers using ai to make themselves much more productive. We need different terms!

No, thank you.

Isn't that what a meth cook does?

I think this is a pointless distinction tbh. Either you're getting good results from AI or you're not. If you're not, you should probably rethink your approach.

I'd offer a new term: curmudgeon coding. This pre-dates LLMs and is the act of engineers endlessly clutching pearls over new technology and its branding. It's a reflexive reaction to marketing hype mixed with a conservative by default attitude. Think hating on "NoSQL". Validity of said hate aside, it's definitely "a type" of developer who habitually engages in whinging.

Needless country club chicanery.

I call it "coding". Nobody has ever cared what IDE I use, what documentation, which syntax autocompleter. I don't see why they should suddenly start to care about my tools when they're LLMs.

Vibe coding is different because it's the "dictated but not read" of coding. Yes, I was around when the LLM was writing the code, and I vaguely instructed it on what to write, but I make no assurances on the quality of the output.

I find coding agents to be a powerful throttle on the speed dimension in exchange of quality in the general sense. With tests to ensure correctness is not compromised (not a silver bullet), linter and pre-commit for code style, the byproduct of AI code is utter verbosity. Pleads to be concise don't work – no more than the "Don't be wrong/hallucinate". In that regard, I like Blaise Pascal quote "I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter."

Worse possible name to be honest.

Please no. We already have a bunch of (human society) semantic slop from vibe coding term being misused. The last thing we need right now is another poorly developed term

> One of the lesser spoken truths of working productively with LLMs as a software engineer on non-toy-projects is that it’s difficult.

I mean, the AI companies have an incentive to make it easier, right? The next iteration of coding agents will be better at working with their human PHBs to divine intent and turn vague specifications into something workable - a key skill of human engineers.

Is this really any different from how Google learned to understand search queries?

we could call it "Reasonable AI Liability" like Ruby does ;)

I am mildly disappointed

I was hoping that "vibe engineering" was going to be designing g bridges in the same way people think they can build apps with vibe coding

That would be alarming

My thoughts:

* There are actual productivity gains to Agentic Coding (my tool of preference is Claude Code)

* There is a big chance of producing a lot of slop if one does not use it with care

* More than ever checking mechanisms are essential (static type checking and a good unit testing suite)

* Everything that was boring and tiresome about unit testing is now mandatory since you will be writing almost none of it.

I’m glad to see that more and more articles and opinions about AI are focused on how it works and it works great just the process and mind thoughtfulness has to adapt and evolve to fully utilize the tool.

That’s so much better than wasting time on the frustrated who just negate without a meaningful try.

I share most of the experience and learning with the author, I just still don’t know how to name the whole process.

The whole vibe thing has already brought negativity into terminology because of all negating.

Closest thing in history of software engineering practice from the past is XP (Xstreme Programmimg) with its pair programming approach. It was a precursor of anything modern agile. Invented at the end of 90s

It’s just this time, my pair programming mate is computer instead of human person, but I treat it as junior to me and review, organize, while coding, testing, documenting is delegate and we jointly do the analysis as a part of the discussion.

I can agree, it’s strongly augmented experience and weird often to newcomers to adapt, but when a critical path to succeed is discovered, it works great and results are a blast!

I agree with your analogy with pair programming. Except that now your co-developer types way faster!

Beautifully put. This puts into words what I was unable to say to those who claim all ai is useless and can only produce slop, if the human is TRULY in control it’s an entirely different ball game. Thank you for this.

Centaur Coding.

These words just don't belong together, period.

Please stop with all this vibe bs. Seems like a desperate attempt at getting viral.

> I propose we call this vibe engineering

Seriously? The term has been around in the community for as long as "vibe coding" has been around. While both sound equally cringe, the statement leaves a bad taste.

Can we please just call it model driven development? I already hated the distortion of "vibe" as it got distorted from Karpathy's original meaning.

Nah.

Software engineer.

Not vibe engineer. Not Java engineer. Not compiler engineer.

You either understand the computer and then can apply any fucking tool or methodology to solve a problem, or you’re out.

This has to be a joke. Real engineering has a requirement of personal liability of the engineer involved. There is zero personal liability in the software which is why it's not real engineering. Until a software developer has to be held personally liable for the code they write and test, then they can call themselves an engineer. Back to vibe engineering, if ever personal liability were required then any AI slop in code would vanish instantly.

Thanks for the AI slop blog content

Welcome to me 13 years ago when India happened. Nobody cared back then. So I just left.

Just reading that exhaustive list of what you supposedly need to do to "be successful" with the non-deterministic-random-text-generation tool shows clearly this is a solution in search of a problem. As engineers we need to principally reject what the disconnected billionaire class are currently pushing on us with these non-tools and this is not, I want to stress that, not because we fear "replacement" - I don't think these machines can replace even the Joe Bullshit in powerpoint generation, as evident from the recent case with Deloitte in Australia. The reason is more profound - these tools endanger the quality of not just engineering, but also outputs in other fields and as such are plain dangerous to the society. If this is supposed to be the future of engineering, then doors falling of Boeings will be but funny anecdotes of "better times" I am afraid. No, this cannot be the future of engineering and in general professional work, unless we want to become again disenfranchised and ignorant serfs.

Amen brother. Other engineers directly recognize the duty they owe to society beyond the duty they owe to any particular company, they have certifications boards and ethical standards for precisely this reason.

It's high time software engineers do the same if they really want to be engineers and not just corporate lackeys who happen to know how to program and/or design computational systems.

Marvelous, now all we need is "vibe civil engineering".

"Vibe coding" sounds too good. Catchy, ridiculous and still cool. It'd be hard to beat. It's a genius move from Andrej Karpathy.

Different strokes I guess. I've always thought it sounded pretty stupid (right up there with asshat and awesomesauce). Conjures up an image of the Big Lebowski writing code while listening to a cheech & chong album.

Except that we're not going to be "coding" very soon. We're going to be firing off jobs that get tracked in VCS, gated through CI, then reviewed by a panel of agents with different specialties. At the end you'll have a few select sections of code that these agents flagged for human review, and thousands of lines of stuff that you don't need to worry about.

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