Comment by plainOldText

7 days ago

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.

  • You're absolutely right ((:

    Now, seriously though, no tools is perfect, and I agree we should not trust it blindly, but leaving aside AI Agents, LLMs are very helpful in illuminating one's path, by consulting a large body of knowledge on demand, particularly when dealing with problems which might be new to you, but which have already been tackled one way or another by other people in the industry (provided they're in the training set of course).

    Yes, there's always the risk of perpetuating existing slop. But that is the risk in any human endeavor. The majority of people mostly follow practices and knowledge established by the few. How many invent new things?

    To be honest, I haven't yet used AI agents, I'm mostly just using LLMs as a dialogue partner to further my own understanding and to deepen my knowledge. I think we're all still trying to figure it out how to best use it.

> 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.