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Professional software developers don't vibe, they control
- game_the0ry 9mo ago> Through field observations (N=13) and qualitative surveys (N=99)... Not a statistically significant sample size.
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- superjose 9mo agoSame thoughts exactly.
- bee_rider 9mo ago97 samples is enough to get a 95% confidence level if you accept a 10% margin of error. 99 is not so bad, at least. https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/ https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/sample-size-calculator/
- HPsquared 9mo agoSignificance depends on effect size.
- flurie 9mo agoThis is a qualitative methods paper, so statistical significance is not relevant. The rough qualitative equivalent would instead be "data saturation" (responses generally look like ones you've received already) and "thematic saturation" (you've likely found all the themes you will find through this method of data collection). There's an intuitive quality to determining the number of responses needed based on the topic and research questions, but this looks to me like they have achieved sufficient thematic saturation based on the results.
- game_the0ry 9mo agoSo, I upvoted your comment bc I genuinely believe there is something in your comments worth learning from, but... > This is a qualitative methods paper, so statistical significance is not relevant. I have never heard of a "qualitative methods paper" and it sounds like something a researcher would do to push a narrative with "qualitative data" rather than data that could be measured. Tell me why I am wrong.
- flurie 9mo agoYou're not necessarily wrong, but the phrase "push a narrative," the scare quotes around "qualitative data," and your initial comment suggest to me that you are not familiar with qualitative research but have a bias or mistrust against it (no judgment, just stating my observation). If you would like to know more about it, this[1] provides a reasonable overview, and if you would like to know much more, I can ask my spouse, who is a qualitative methodologist in medicine at an R1[2], for her recommendations. I can also tell you what I think of this specific paper, but I did not want it to color my initial comment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_in_the_United_States#Universities_classified_among_%22R1:_Doctoral_Universities_%E2%80%93_Very_high_research_spending_and_doctorate_production%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_...
- game_the0ry 9mo ago> your initial comment suggest to me that you are not familiar with qualitative research but have a bias or mistrust against it I can confirm that, yes, I do have an arguably paranoid bias and/or mistrust against information that is not quantifiable in nature nor is simple enough for me (an idiot) to understand easily. Appreciate the thoughtful response. Don't ask the spouse, just enjoy the new year. I'll figure it out.
- energy123 9mo agoHow many independent witnesses would you need to convict someone of murder?
- runtimepanic 9mo agoThe title is doing a lot of work here. What resonated with me is the shift from “writing code” to “steering systems” rather than the hype framing. Senior devs already spend more time constraining, reviewing, and shaping outcomes than typing syntax. AI just makes that explicit. The real skill gap isn’t prompt cleverness, it’s knowing when the agent is confidently wrong and how to fence it in with tests, architecture, and invariants. That part doesn’t scale magically.
- llmslave2 9mo agoDoes using an LLM to craft Hackernews comments count as "steering systems"?
- coip 9mo agoYou're totally right! It's not steering systems -- it's cooking, apparently
- AlotOfReading 9mo agoIt's difficult to steer complex systems correctly, because no one has a complete picture of the end goal at the outset. That's why waterfall fails. Writing code agentically means you have to go out of your way to think deeply about what you're building, because it won't be forced on you by the act of writing code. If your requirements are complex, they might actually be a hindrance because you're going have to learn those lessons from failed iterations instead of avoiding them preemptively.
- _cenw 9mo agoIs anyone else getting more mentally exhausted by this? I get more done, but I also miss the relaxing code typing in the middle of the process.
- simonw 9mo agoYes, absolutely, I can be mentally wiped out by lunch.
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- lesuorac 9mo ago> Most Recent Task for Survey > Number of Survey Respondents > Building apps 53 > Testing 1 I think this sums up everybody complaints about AI generated code. Don't ask me to be the one to review work you didn't even check.
- rco8786 9mo agoYea. Nobody wants to be a full-time code reviewer.
- jaggederest 9mo agoHi it's me, the guy who wants to be a full-time code reviewer.
- nemo 9mo agoBe careful what you wish for.
- sarchertech 9mo agoIf you really did that full time and never wrote code, you’d be a terrible reviewer.
- littlestymaar 9mo agoThis is fine for us who've been building code by hand for many years before the advent of LLMs but it's definitely going to be a problem going forward.
- mannycalavera42 9mo agostrong +1 here :-)
- throw-12-16 9mo agoI fired someone over this a few months ago.
- 4b11b4 9mo agoI like to think of it as "maintaining fertile soil"
- banbangtuth 9mo agoYou know what. After seeing all these articles about AI/LLM for these past 4 years, about how they are going to replace me as software developers and about how I am not productive enough without using 5 agents and being a project manager. I. Don't. Care. I don't even care about those debates outside. Debates about do LLM work and replace programmers? Say they do, ok so what? I simply have too much fun programming. I am just a mere fullstack business line programmer, generic random replaceable dude, you can find me dime a dozen. I do use LLM as Stack Overflow/docs replacement, but I always code by hand all my code. If you want to replace me, replace me. I'll go to companies that need me. If there are no companies that need my skill, fine, then I'll just do this as a hobby, and probably flip burgers outside to make a living. I don't care about your LLM, I don't care about your agent, I probably don't even care about the job prospects for that matter if I have to be forced to use tools that I don't like and to use workflows I don't like. You can go ahead find others who are willing to do it for you. As for me, I simply have too much fun programming. Now if you excuse me, I need to go have fun.
- agentifysh 9mo agohaving fun isn't tied to employment unless you are self-employed even then what's fun should not be the driving force
- banbangtuth 9mo agoWhy? It is a matter of values. Fun can be a driving force just like money and stability is. It is simply a matter of your values (and your sacrifices). Like I said, I am just a generic replaceable dime a dozen programmer dude.
- agentifysh 9mo agoyou dont get paid to have fun but to produce as a laborer a job isn't supposed to be fun its nice when it is but it shouldn't be what drives decisions
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- websiteapi 9mo agowe've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those paying the salaries. :)
- zwnow 9mo agoAlso it really baffles me how many are actually in on the hype train. Its a lot more than the crypto bros back in the day. Good thing AI still cant reason and innovate stuff. Also leaking credentials is a felony in my country so I also wont ever attach it to my codebases.
- fragmede 9mo agoyour credentials shouldn't be in your codebase to begin with!
- zwnow 9mo ago.env files are a thing in tons of codebases
- iwontberude 9mo agobut thats at runtime, secrets are going to be deployed in a secure manner after the code is released
- zwnow 9mo ago.env files are used to develop as well, for some things like PayPal u dont have to change the credentials, you just enable sandbox mode. If I had some LLM attached to my codebase, it would be able to read those credentials from the .env file. This has nothing to do with deployment. I never talked about deployment.
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- andy99 9mo agoIs the title an ironic play on AI’s trademark writing style, is it AI generated, or is the style just rubbing off on people?
- mattnewton 9mo agoI think it’s a popular style before gen ai and the training process of LLMs picked up on that.
- andy99 9mo agoThat’s not how LLMs work, it’s part of the reinforcement learning or SFT dataset, data labelers would have written or generated tons of examples using this and other patterns (all the emoji READMEs for example) that the models emulate. The early ones had very formulaic essay style outputs that always ended with “in conclusion”, lots of the same kind of bullet lists, and a love of adjectives and delving, all of which were intentionally trained in. It’s more subtle now but it’s still there.
- mattnewton 9mo agoMaybe I was being imprecise, but I’m not sure what you mean by “not how LLMs work” - discovering patterns of how humans write is exactly the signal they are trained against. Either explicitly curated like SFT or coaxed out during RLHF, no? It could even have been picked up in pretraining and then rewarded during rlhf when the output domain was being refined; I haven’t used enough LLMs before post training to know what step it usually becomes noticeable.
- zwnow 9mo agoIdk, I still mostly avoid using it and if I do, I just copy and paste shit into the Claude web version. I wont ever manage agents as that sounds just as complicated as coding shit myself.
- lexandstuff 9mo agoIt's not complicated at all. You don't "manage agents". You just type your prompt into an terminal application that can update files, read your docs and run your tests. As with every new tech there's a hell of a lot of noise (plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP - to quote Kaparthy) but most of it can just be disregarded. No one is "behind" - it's all very easy to use.
- danielbln 9mo agoEasy to use, hard to master. Or: low skill floor, high skill ceiling. My output wouldn't be nearly as good without subagents and skills, and MCPs are somewhat required if you deploy tool using agents at scale. It's like saying all you need is notepad to develop. It's not wrong, but.. you know.
- micik 9mo agoIt’s not hard to master. It’s not a skill to be learned —- it’s a tool that comes with a manual. You read the manual and now you can use the tool. Most people never will read the manual which is what gives the false impression that there’s something “to master” here. It’s like saying vím is harder to use than notepad. Not if you read the entire manual first.
- danielbln 9mo agoI'm not sure how you define skill acquisition, it's reading documentation and doing the skill, yes? The AI landscape shifts rather quickly still, and a new LLM + harness has a different set of functionality, but more importantly different fuzzy failure cases Things a model is particular good at, things that work better if you combine certain systems. All of it is documented, but also fast moving and new things are discovered frequently. In comparison, Vim has been around for decades. And vum is absolutely harder to use than notepad. Otherwise it's like saying that rocket science isn't hard because you just have to read the documentation to know how to engineer a rocket.
- simonw 9mo agoThis is pretty recent - the survey they ran (99 respondents) was August 18 to September 23 2025 and the field observations (watching developers for 45 minute then a 30 minute interview, 13 participants) were August 1 to October 3. The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one mention of Sonnet 4.5.) This is notable because a lot of academic papers take 6-12 months to come out, by which time the LLM space has often moved on by an entire model generation.
- dheera 9mo ago> academic papers take 6-12 months to come out It takes about 6 months to figure out how to get LaTeX to position figures where you want them, and then another 6 months to fight with reviewers
- joenot443 9mo agoThanks Simon - always quick on the draw. Off your intuition, do you think the same study with Codex 5.2 and Opus 4.5 would see even better results?
- simonw 9mo agoDepends on the participants. If they're cutting-edge LLM users then yes, I think so. If they continue to use LLMs like they would have back in the first half of 2025 I'm not sure if a difference would be noticeable.
- zkmon 9mo agoI haven't seen the definition of an agent, in the paper. Do they differentiate agents from generic online chat interfaces?
- esafak 9mo agoAn agent takes actions. Chat bots only return text.
- zkmon 9mo ago"takes actions" is automation and its is hardly new. Code was always taking actions over the decades. Interpreting and generating text belongs to chat bots. What's new with agents?
- esafak 9mo agoYour code only takes actions prescribed by you. The agent does not; it picks the tool. I thought this was too obvious to point out.
- senshan 9mo agoPage 2: We define agentic tools or agents as AI tools integrated into an IDE or a terminal that can manipulate the code directly (i.e., excluding web-based chat interfaces)
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- senshan 9mo agoExcellent survey, but one has to be careful when participating in such surveys: "I’m on disability, but agents let me code again and be more productive than ever (in a 25+ year career). - S22" Once Social Security Administration learns this, there goes the disability benefit...
- LoganDark 9mo agoI think you eventually lose disability benefits anyway once you start making money.
- geldedus 9mo agoThe "Ai-assisted programming" mistaken for "vibe coding" is getting old and annoying
- senshan 9mo agoI often tell people that agentic programming tools are the best thing since cscope. The last 6 months I have not used cscope even once after decades of using it nearly daily. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cscope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cscope
- utopiah 9mo agoWell, looks like that's how I'm spending my day https://cscope.sourceforge.net/cscope_vim_tutorial.html https://cscope.sourceforge.net/cscope_vim_tutorial.html Out of curiosity, if I wanted to setup cscope for a bunch of small projects, say dozens of prototypes in their own directory, would it be useful? Too broad?
- andrewstuart 9mo agoDon’t let anyone tell you the right way to program a computer. Do it in the way that makes you feel happy, or conforms to organizational standards.
- mkoubaa 9mo agoThe right way to program a computer: Well
- andrewstuart 9mo agoNo. There’s many contexts in which programming a computer well is not important.
- AYBABTME 9mo agoIt feels like we're doing another lift to a higher level of abstraction. Whereas we had "automatic programming" and "high level programming languages" free us from assembly, where higher level abstractions could be represented without the author having to know or care about the assembly (and it took decades for the switch to happen), we now once again get pulled up another layer. We're in the midst of another abstraction level becoming the working layer - and that's not a small layer jump but a jump to a completely different plane. And I think once again, we'll benefit from getting tools that help us specify the high level concepts we intend, and ways to enforce that the generated code is correct - not necessarily fast or efficient but at least correct - same as compilers do. And this lift is happening on a much more accelerated timeline. The problem of ensuring correctness of the generated code across all the layers we're now skipping is going to be the crux of how we manage to leverage LLM/agentic coding. Maybe Cursor is TurboPascal.
- ramoz 9mo ago> Takeaway 3c: Experienced developers disagree about using agents for software planning and design. Some avoided agents out of concern over the importance of design, while others embraced back-and-forth design with an AI. Im in the back-and-forth camp. I expect a lot of interesting UX to develop here. I built https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator https://github.com/backnotprop/plannotator over the weekend to give me a better way to review & collaborate around plans - all while natively integrated into the coding agent harness.
- softwaredoug 9mo agoThe new layer of abstraction is tests. Mostly end-to-end and integration tests. It describes the important constraints to the agents, essentially long lived context. So essentially what this means is a declarative programming system of overall system behavior.
- 000ooo000 9mo agoHave to wonder about the motivations of research when the intro leads with such a quote.
- amkharg26 9mo agoThe title is provocative but there's truth to it. The distinction between "vibing" with AI tools and actually controlling the output is crucial for production code. I've seen this with code generation tools - developers who treat AI suggestions as magic often struggle when the output doesn't work or introduces subtle bugs. The professionals who succeed are those who understand what the AI is doing, validate the output rigorously, and maintain clear mental models of their system. This becomes especially important for code quality and technical debt. If you're just accepting AI-generated code without understanding architectural implications, you're building a maintenance nightmare. Control means being able to reason about tradeoffs, not just getting something that "works" in the moment.
- SunlitCat 9mo agoFunny how the title alone evokes the old “real programmers” trope https://xkcd.com/378/ https://xkcd.com/378/
- danavar 9mo agoSo much of my professional SWE jobs isn't even programming - I feel like this is a detail missed by so many. Generally people just stereotype SWE as a programmer, but being an engineer (in any discipline) is so much more than that. You solve problems. AI will speed up the programming work-streams, but there is so much more to our jobs than that.
- danielbln 9mo agoThere is also so much more you can automate and use AI agents for than "programming". It's the world's best rubber duck, for one. It also can dig through code bases and compile information on data flows, data models and so on. Hell, it can automate effectively any task you do on the terminal.
- whstl 9mo agoAgreed. Most of the work brought to me gets done before I even think about sitting down to type. And it's interesting to see the divide here between "pure coder" and "coder + more". A lot of people seem to be in the job to just do what the PM, designer and business people ask. A lot of work is pushing back against some of those requests. In conversations here in HN about "essential complexity" I even see commenters arguing that the spec brought to you is entirely essential. It's not.
- ciaranmca 9mo ago^This 100%. Junior SWE here. Agentic coding has kinda felt like a promotion for me. I code less by hand and spend more time on the actual engineering side of things. There’s hype in both directions though. I don’t AI is replacing me anytime soon(fingers crossed), but it’s already way more useful than the skeptics give it credit for. Like most things the truth’s somewhere in the middle.
- throw-12-16 9mo agoGetting big "I'll keep making saddles in the era of automobiles" vibes from these comments.
- danielbln 9mo agoYeah, it feels many SWEs have painted themselves into a corner. They love the nose-to-code-grindstone process and chain themselves to the abstraction layer of today. I don't think it's gonna end well for them, let's see.
- Snuggly73 9mo agoThis type of comment implies that it’s going to stop with “them” and somehow “us that adopted the LLM” will be the winners. The goal is full automation, there is no “adapt or be left behind”.
- danielbln 9mo agoI don't think in terms of winners or losers, automation will come for all of us. Some of us will be caught by it later than others.
- learningstud 9mo agoIf developers are not using TLA+ or Lean4 etc. They are vibe coding. Nothing wrong with that. They just have to realize that they were never in control. Thinking logically is much harder than developers imagined. As Dijkstra observed, the whole field has adopted the mentra, "How to program when you cannot." I estimate that 80% of what developers do can be done once and for all for all of humanity, yet we don't learn. Be offended all you want, but I am fed up with this idiocy given all the usual rebuttals of deadlines etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43679634