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Vibe Coding Is Not Engineering
- hiteshsundraaa 4mo agoOnly if you are blindly allowing the ai to do the entire work.
- dannypdx 4mo agoSoftware Engineering is often not truly Engineering. The days of Devs gatekeeping and shitting on good ideas because the syntax of a PR was not perfect are over.
- rvz 4mo ago> Software Engineering is often not truly Engineering. "vibe coding" by definition means you are not looking or understanding the generated code and you are accepting all changes and "fixes" by the AI. In software engineering, you must understand what the code is doing and you will struggle to resolve sudden issues if you do not understand these systems which risk outages, loss of money, and data. You do not want to be "vibe coding" software that is to be operating on planes. That would be disastrous. > The days of Devs gatekeeping and shitting on good ideas because the syntax of a PR was not perfect are over. Developers who do that without using a formatter are the bad ones anyway and are there to argue and waste your time.
- bdcravens 4mo agoThere are many who built careers around being essentially software assembly liners. Glue together framework/library bits, following well-trod paths. Get really good at Googling and grabbing code from Stack Overflow when you have to go off the path or solve problems.
- trollbridge 4mo agoYou just described essentially what those coding "boot camps" taught people to do. Something you can learn in 12 weeks always seemed to me to be a job at high risk of automation. Unfortunately, many "computer science" curricula weren't much better, and so now we have hordes of unemployed people with a skillset about as relevant as being able to hand-assemble ZRA1 code.
- bdcravens 4mo agoBoth boot camps and academia do a poor job of preparing developers for a real career, they just started at opposite ends of the problem and never provide enough depth to get to the good part in the middle. (I'm a very biased self-taught developer from the late 1990s who just happened to hit the industry at the perfect time)
- dannypdx 4mo ago'vibe coding' is just a derogatory term that devs use to belittle better builders. Most software engineers are hilariously inept at systems engineering,
- ejejje1 4mo ago[dead]
- qsera 4mo ago>set hard deadlines.. Sure, just also set the requirements "hard" while your are at it..
- ravenstine 4mo agoSurely a "small tweak" won't take too long, right? /s
- erelong 4mo agoIt is, but it may not be "good" engineering
- bdcravens 4mo agoIt's an old debate, so I won't rehash all of the points here, but many argue that being a "good" software developer doesn't make you an "engineer".
- reaperducer 4mo agoOld Southern saying: "You can put puppies in the oven, but that don't make them biscuits."
- abc42 4mo agoYeah, more like architecture or management.
- montroser 4mo agoWell, my team does what we call vibe engineering. You do ask hard questions up front, define boundaries, give lots of high level architectural guidance, declare interfaces, and bounds of abstraction... And then you ask the LLM to make it so, and it does. You give it the structure, and it fills in the implementation. This is engineering, more or less.
- reaperducer 4mo agoThis is engineering, more or less. People who build bridges for a living shake their heads in dismay.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoBefore AI we have seen drastic drops in software quality across the board, even Windows has been going downhill for several major versions now.
- reaperducer 4mo agoWhat's your point? You seem to be implying that since the current wave of AI started that things have gotten better. That is demonstrably, repeatedly, and completely false. Just cruise the HN front page and watch the AI fails scroll by. That you point to Windows getting bad over the years, and the fact that it continues to get worse with the full AI buy-in of Microsoft, shows that AI is not some magical software savior.
- giancarlostoro 4mo agoWhen something is wrong everyone complains, when nothing is wrong you rarely hear a peep. I've either shipped to production or helped others ship "AI Slop" code as would be blindly described by others, despite me reviewing it and testing it. I've first hand seen AI-first greenfield projects go into production and help small businesses achieve more sales and success, heck I reviewed such code for a relative who is now hiring developers and lets them AI code so long as they review, because it gave him something no software company in his market would offer.
- bdcravens 4mo ago"Vibe coding produces code. Engineering produces systems." By this definition, anyone hired to be a code contributor, and not operating at the architecture level, isn't an engineer. On the other side of that definition, engineering doesn't even require code, but would be architecture with deep technical understanding that allows you to create the tasks that you hand off to individual coders.
- jnovek 4mo agoIm pretty sure this is a category error. The correct comparison would be: - A person writing code vs a bot writing code - A person designing systems vs a bot designing systems The comparison in the article is between a bot writing code and a person designing systems.
- throwatdem12311 4mo ago> By this definition, anyone hired to be a code contributor, and not operating at the architecture level, isn't an engineer. You say that as if it’s not true, but it is. And even then, still not always. Engineer is a regulated term in Canada. If you’re not licensed, you’re not an engineer. If you say you are and acting as one in a professional capacity you are comitting fraud. The amount of delulu Americans larping as engineers is always good for a laugh.
- pegasus 4mo agoSo unless you're licensed in Canada, you're not an engineer? That's a very silly notion...
- throwatdem12311 4mo agoWe recognized socially that people who engineer things need to have professional ethics and carry liability for their projects. The whole reason we have engineers is because we used to let anyone call themselves that and lo and behold a bunch of bridges collapsed under load and killed people. Who could’ve thought?! Almost 2/3rds of the professionals in my family are licensed engineers and we take it extremely seriously. Canada has only been actually licensing software engineers for a short time compared to other disciplines - but the industry as a whole is due for a reckoning.
- whimbyte 4mo agoTrue. But it can be very helpful for learning new things.
- Majeh905 4mo ago"Vibe coding gets you a demo" I agree with this. Sadly, we're good at pushing working demos as the final product in corporate.
- guff_se 4mo agoGreat! I’ll just take the link to your article and ask Claude to consider this as it develops my project. Thanks!
- computerphage 4mo agoThis is AI written, according to pangram, and also obviously
- bhaak 4mo agoVibe coding is not engineering. Neither is copying answers from Stack Overflow. Who even puts forward such claims?
- classified 4mo agoJust look at the other comments in this thread and you see exactly those claims. We live in entertaining times.
- andrewstuart 4mo agoWord games from anti AI folks.
- dosinga 4mo agosecond paragraph > A model can generate a login system in seconds. It will not ask if emails must be unique. That single missing requirement can collapse the system. LLMs cannot see the category of questions that keep software safe. really? I am assuming here that the author means that the emails used when registering across users need to be unique. even mediocre models will do that for you. even more to the point though, if you tell an LLM, hey I want to build this system, let's talk about the architecture, it will ask you all the relevant questions. this can really help with the engineering. sure, there's a rubber ducking aspect to it, but even so. telling an LLM to immediately implement an idea does not lead to great engineering. starting to code yourself has the same problem. doing some brainstorming with an LLM (like in the olden days with humans) is where they help with the engineering part.
- mystraline 4mo agoLike hell it isnt. Ive used it to write that terrible one-off powershell or bash script. You know the types: grunt work, boring, and you just need it done. I can ask my local LLM to make it. Its done as fast as it takes to load up a console and vim. I spend a minute or 2 reviewing, and run in stage. The tough stuff or API specific proprietary stuff; i still write and maintain. But the drudge work is getting automated.
- throwaway7783 4mo agoCan you share your local LLM setup?
- mystraline 4mo agoIts just my desktop running Krasis. 96GB ddr5, 16GB nvidia 5060. Im running qwen-3.5-80B in int4 mode. It uses like 45GB system ram and 11GB g-ram.
- pocksuppet 4mo agoIt was already debated whether "software engineering" is engineering, even before LLMs. Even traditional software engineering looks nothing like other fields - in particular lacking a whole lot of discipline. I believe it is, because it's a process of creating complex artefacts to satisfy business requirements, despite the different medium - that definition still remains true when an LLM is used as one of many tools. But "vibe coding" means the LLM is the only tool. Is that still engineering? Well I guess, did you create an artefact that satisfied business requirements? Seems like you did. There's not a good clear line here.
- m3kw9 4mo agoThis is well known
- empressplay 4mo agoI think this should be titled 'YOLO one-shotting is not engineering' which is a far more accurate description of the article.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- tontonius 4mo agowhat’s this precocious urge to define what vibe coding is and isn’t? who cares?
- barbazoo 4mo agoI'm assuming often it's gatekeeping by people that are terrified seeing what they thought their purpose was slip away. That's why they have to make what we produce with the LLM something lesser than what they can do by themselves.
- fny 4mo agoI'm going to take this a step further. Software development is not engineering. Software development is more like being a construction worker that uses engineered materials. The engineers, on the other hand, develop the structural components (steel beams, the actual dry wall), an architect designs the whole system, and a contractor manages it. With vibe coding, you make yourself the contractor and turn agent into the other roles. You can choose to build a building without an architect (you or the agent) and without using engineered components (a proper database for example), which will likely lead to leaks or a full on collapse. Frankly, this is no different to the franksystems build in midieval times.
- pegasus 4mo agoBy "franksystems" do you mean those cathedrals which will outlast most buildings we're putting up today? We could go even farther back in history: how about the Pantheon, still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever made?
- fny 4mo agoI mean the garbage people built without engineered components or architectures in days of yore: manual slop if you will.
- vitrealis 4mo ago> ”Given a simple prompt: write python to "Add user accounts to a website so people can log in." The model generated a small, working Flask and SQLite example. That is acceptable for a demo but it did not ask about these five requirements: Should emails be unique Should accounts be verified Should users reset passwords Should roles exist What is the security model? ” Write a better prompt? I don’t think any software engineer would ever send that?
- xurenwu 4mo agoIt suit rookie but not someone who kown what are rational .
- NK_MAK 4mo ago[dead]
- niros_valtos 4mo agoThe line I'd draw is accountability: who owns it in prod at 3am. Vibe coding is fine for throwaway and prototypes, and it becomes a problem when the prototype quietly turns into the system and nobody can explain how it works. Don't get me wrong, there is a room for production systems coded completely with AI, it just needs to be more thoughtful in the way it is done.
- likecode_app 4mo ago[flagged]