Comment by simonw

7 days ago

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.

19 comments

simonw

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daveguy  7 days ago

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?

  • simonw  7 days ago

    The AI adds a ton. It really is like having a whole team of extra coders available, all of which can type faster than you.

    Getting good results out of that team is hard, because the bottleneck is how quickly you can review their workflow and point them in new directions.

    Understanding techniques like TDD, CI, linting, specification writing, research spikes etc turns out to be key to unlocking that potential. That's why experienced software engineers have such a big advantage, if they choose to use it.

    • zdragnar  7 days ago

      I've yet to get any quality code out of one, though I don't try particularly hard either. I'd rather spend my time actually coding, especially since all the positive stories about enhanced productivity are anecdotes, and the hard data remains far less supportive of the claim.

      3 replies →

    • dlisboa  7 days ago

      I’d say what you’re doing is architecting, like the old term for “software architect”. Those are professional who know how to design a system from a high level and have the experience to judge a good implementation of it but they themselves do not write the code.

      Likewise real world architects have the skills to design a building but do not care or know how to build it, relying on engineers for that.

      I think it’s important to distinguish because we’re increasingly seeing a trend towards final product over production, meaning these “vibe” people want the tool in the end and consider the steps in between to be just busywork and AI can do for them.

      That’s closer to product design than to engineering. If I can imagine Monalisa and write that thought to paper, communicating that thought and getting a painter to paint it for me does not make me Da Vinci.

      2 replies →

    • arscan  7 days ago

      Hmmm, I think it’s a bit paradoxical to try to come up with a fun term to encourage the spread of the concept, as the concept itself is quite dull by definition. It’s just software engineering. Boring process stuff where you do a bunch of other things around the ‘building’ part that lets you scale up with quality. Vibe is about fun and go-with-the-flow. This isn’t that. It should connote pocket protectors, not sunglasses. Right?

      Clearly I’m not in marketing.

      Regardless, I’m delighted that this has gotten people to ‘independently discover’ software engineering best practices on their own.

    • AdieuToLogic  7 days ago

      >> How much does the AI add if you already have solid procedures in place for everything else the AI needs not to go bonkers?

      > The AI adds a ton. It really is like having a whole team of extra coders available, all of which can type faster than you.

      Funny thing is, the least time consuming aspect of making programs is encoding solutions in source form. For example, a reasonable typist can produce thousands of text lines per workday if they know what must be typed (such as transcribing documents).

      What takes longest when producing programmatic solutions is understanding what must be typed in the first place. After that, the rest is just an exercise in typing and picking good file/type/variable names.

mkozlows  7 days ago

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.

saberience  6 days ago

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" ??

  • simonw  6 days ago

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

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