Vibe Coding Is Not Engineering

https://phroneses.com/articles/build/notes/vibe-coding-is-not-engineering.html

by jhevans • 2 months ago

46 69 2 months ago

phroneses.com

hiteshsundraaa• 2 months ago

Only if you are blindly allowing the ai to do the entire work.

dannypdx2• 2 months ago

Software 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• 2 months 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.

bdcravens5• 2 months ago

There 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.

dannypdx2• 2 months ago

'vibe coding' is just a derogatory term that devs use to belittle better builders.

Most software engineers are hilariously inept at systems engineering,

erelong• 2 months ago

It is, but it may not be "good" engineering

bdcravens5• 2 months ago

It'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".

reaperducer5• 2 months ago

Old Southern saying: "You can put puppies in the oven, but that don't make them biscuits."

abc42• 2 months ago

Yeah, more like architecture or management.

montroser3• 2 months ago

Well, 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.

reaperducer5• 2 months ago

This is engineering, more or less.

People who build bridges for a living shake their heads in dismay.

giancarlostoro5• 2 months ago

Before AI we have seen drastic drops in software quality across the board, even Windows has been going downhill for several major versions now.

petcat• 2 months ago

The bridge architects and engineers are not the ones hammering in the nails.

bdcravens5• 2 months ago

They already were well before LLMs.

    myFramework new myCoolStartup
    myFramework generate dataModel
    myFramework generate controllerForModel
    myPackageManager install coolViewWidgets
    # insert glue code I learned on Youtube here
    git push coolPaaS myBranch

qsera4• 2 months ago

At least bridges come in the realm of unchanging physics and unchanging material behavior. There is only so much variety in building bridges.

Software on the other hand...

You see, the difference is that with building bridges, there is no value in building a "Toy" bridge that does not require any real knowledge. But even toy software can bring huge value. But that does not mean it does not require engineering discipline to build non-toy software.

Software engineering is not about learning libraries or tools. It is the art and science of managing complexity under constant change.

giancarlostoro5• 2 months ago

The rest of us who do similar work with the model to build richly define spec files. Spec driven development is a lost art with non-AI coding anyway. People who complain about these things either do not work with people using AI correctly and dont realize they just need to push for better standards or they are terrible at architecting. I notice everyone who hates AI just finds any excuse to dismiss it instead of actually pushing towards more effective ways of using it.

I would love to see how perfect their “organic” code looks because I wont be surprised if its full of all sorts of issues, all in prod, for years, never known or spotted, just to be found and fixed by Claude in 15 minutes, with unit testing to test and ensure no regression is introduced.

qsera4• 2 months ago

using AI correct

There is no "correct" way to toss a coin. Some day people who are depending on LLMs blindly will understand that. All their notions of "correct use" is based on folk lore and...vibes, that is just maximizing token use under some misguided notion of "correctness"..

bhaak3• 2 months ago

Who ensures it followed the specs?

The more context an LLM gets, the more likely it will start to ignore instructions.

If the LLM runs a context compression, all bets are off. There's a reason Anthropic upped the context to 1M tokens to reduce the chance of this from happening.

ceejayoz2• 2 months ago

Who ensures it followed the specs?

I mean, it's the same with building a bridge in the real world, right?

Someone has to check the work.

not_a_bot_4sho• 2 months ago

Who ensures it followed the specs?

The human. But only if you care about verification.

nilirl• 2 months ago

How do you do this? I really struggle to get the agents to follow my architectural invariants and coding conventions.

I use Cursor and Codex but the agents keep making regressions and breaking rules. They'll even take shortcuts sometimes, by doing things to make tests pass but with code that would be dangerous in prod.

Now, I use them file by file but it feels more like a typing assistant than something much more.

zulux• 2 months ago

When your AI slides, make a permanent test that catches that particular slide. Then have it run all the tests every time it does something significant.

We have as much test code as deployable code because the AI keeps finding ways to do what we told it to, but not what we meant.

bdelmas• 2 months ago

As of today they can't. You have to tell them what the new API looks like, which new classes they have to create and describe them in detail, etc... You have new projects that try to add good practices in the prompt [0] or audit your code once in a while [1] but it's not enough.

Right now they can be autonomous to finding bugs and inconsistencies. But not architecture or even just creating a long enough PR without any guidance and feedback.

[0] https://github.com/ChristopherKahler/carl

[1] https://github.com/ChristopherKahler/aegis

bdcravens5• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Im 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.

throwatdem123113• 2 months 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.

pegasus3• 2 months ago

So unless you're licensed in Canada, you're not an engineer? That's a very silly notion...

whimbyte• 2 months ago

True. But it can be very helpful for learning new things.

Majeh905• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

Great! I’ll just take the link to your article and ask Claude to consider this as it develops my project. Thanks!

computerphage• 2 months ago

This is AI written, according to pangram, and also obviously

bhaak3• 2 months ago

Vibe coding is not engineering. Neither is copying answers from Stack Overflow.

Who even puts forward such claims?

classified• 2 months ago

Just look at the other comments in this thread and you see exactly those claims. We live in entertaining times.

andrewstuart• 2 months ago

Word games from anti AI folks.

dosinga• 2 months ago

second 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.

mystraline2• 2 months ago

Like 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• 2 months ago

Can you share your local LLM setup?

mystraline2• 2 months ago

Its 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• 2 months ago

It 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• 2 months ago

This is well known

empressplay• 2 months ago

I think this should be titled 'YOLO one-shotting is not engineering' which is a far more accurate description of the article.

tontonius• 2 months ago

what’s this precocious urge to define what vibe coding is and isn’t?

who cares?

barbazoo• 2 months ago

I'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.

fny2• 2 months ago

I'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.

pegasus3• 2 months ago

By "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?

fny2• 2 months ago

I mean the garbage people built without engineered components or architectures in days of yore: manual slop if you will.

vitrealis• 2 months 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• 2 months ago

It suit rookie but not someone who kown what are rational .

niros_valtos• 2 months ago

The 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.

Vibe Coding Is Not Engineering

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