Comment by tabbott

7 days ago

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.