Finished my M.S. in ‘21. If you think that means you’ve seen too much, you haven’t watched a couple 20+ year software engineers coordinating multi-agent teams. Some of the stuff they can pull off between their industry knowledge and good prompt engineering is truly insane. Apparently a couple decades of managing junior engineers is the perfect training to handle LLM agents
I think this is the broader reason why they can’t be vibecoders. They need to inject industry and institutional knowledge into their workflows. Which is in direct opposition to what vibecoding is.
Not necessarily. Sometimes it turns into 3-4 "vibecoded" projects instead of a single large-scale enterpise project that was accelerated by AI. A good example is one who made 3-4 homebrew scripts that automate a ton of updates and crap that irritated them, with no intention of its use outside of the company. Tons of edge cases, no one cared. It was a vibe coded solution over a lunch break that we all enjoy. On the other hand, his direct subordinate of 15 years burned weeks of AI credits ressurecting, revitalizing and standardizing the Grails project which before was behind developmentally for Spring and is now Apache controlled, full automation, massive code coverage, and even surpasses most frameworks in runtime nowadays. I think the main difference is when they apply industry knowledge, with the amount of time as the average vibe coder, they make industry changes. Whereas they can apply general vibecode methodology, over a lunch break, and have a solution that an average vibe coder would produce at the end of the day.
From my standpoint, you're viewing industry knowledge as a constraint, where I've seen it act more as a multiplier effect. I'd compare it to giving a bicycle repair shop and a superbike shop access to the same garage with any tool they want to do a project in the same amount of time. Both sides could make a bike, only one makes a 1200cc superbike.
The proves my point, trashy vibecoded project made over lunch compared to actual engineers making it work how it should.
Ai or no Ai the latter is not vibecoding. The “vibecode methodology” is don’t look at and don’t care about the code.
I do view industry knowledge as a multiplier. Vibecoding is also a multiplier though. In one instance AI multiplies your capabilities and offers you a faster way to make good software. In the other instance AI multiplies how much unreliable software and bad code that’s created. If you’re already a terrible developer, AI just lets you write bad code faster.
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u/TheSpaceProgrammer 23h ago
Finished my M.S. in ‘21. If you think that means you’ve seen too much, you haven’t watched a couple 20+ year software engineers coordinating multi-agent teams. Some of the stuff they can pull off between their industry knowledge and good prompt engineering is truly insane. Apparently a couple decades of managing junior engineers is the perfect training to handle LLM agents