Command Lines

This has been what I've been seeing internally within $DAYJOB down to the split between vibe coding / vibe engineering / artisinally crafted code.

The gaps between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow, and I'm curious to see what tools we get to use internally and what we can't... I've been able to demonstrate significant speed up in development time for features with certain tools but the amount of control some of these companies want in contracts are things the company hadn't seen before, and made it too conservative to go in on.

I also see this space changing so much that I don't particularly care for the tools for individuals now as much as I care about the way I share the workload with my team. I need a way to keep everyone up to date and reviewing code without getting brain drained as fast. Review fatigue is real, and it sucks. I haven't really found one that I've liked in that regard and one that a Fortune N company would want to go in on.

I was trying to create a spectrum of agentic tools ranging from "Vibe coding" to "Old-school craftmanship". This article did exactly that for me :)

> The gap between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow

Yeah, the ONLY place I hear this where it means "AI pushers are getting faster" is on this website, where half of your salaries depend on said belief.

When I go outside and talk to real engineers who I respect, in confidence and away from the suits forcing them to use AI, away from the hype of the industry telling them only one opinion is allowed, they all agree that "agentic coding" is simply not a meaningful improvement in quality or speed of publishing working software in the real world.

Maybe you like it, and that's fine. If you want to pay a lot of money for advanced IntelliSense and you can get your boss to do that for you, have fun. Just don't force it on me.

I don't believe you'll be meaningfully faster or produce better work than I can without the clanker's help.

If I get furloughed I'm going to get a new career working with my hands.

I’m still waiting for an article like this one:

https://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2013/04/acme-as-editor_...

It’s clear, informative, and even without reproducing it, you can still form an opinion about the tool.

All the AI pushers’s comments are either very vague or experiments whose sole quality is that it has been done with LLMs (often badly).

TIL that Grace Hopper invented zero-based version numbers.

I wonder if decline of sites like StackOverflow will mean that model quality may crest at some point, at least for newest topics. There are cyclic dependencies in the industry though so maybe everything will evolve in a novel direction. Another possibility is that such sites may become valuable enough as training inputs to start sharing some of the money firehose with contributors.

Cursor may have had incredible growth, but so many companies are getting into these early and obvious products to enhance developer productivity, I don't think they're going to be dominant (independently at least) for much longer.

Google is a direct competitor now, every major model company has an agentic coder, tons of people are putting out small enhancements and useful tools to augment all of these.

In terms of creating a viable business, I would (and have) position myself a step or two away from these obvious solutions. Further out in the ecosystem there's a ton of nuance around specific use cases, programming languages, development and deployment environments; all which will be revolutionized (again) in the years to come.

There’s been a few that show the Git history of a project that were (allegedly) fully written with an LLM. Not fully vibe coded, but in a meaningful amount.

I’d like the term “Trad Coding” to catch on.

Hot take: Sounds too similar to stuff like "Trad wife", with an implied connotation of right-wing politics. (Is it possible to be tradcoding a transcoding? :P )

I think “trad wife” is kind of a special case. “Trad climbing” is a common usage and doesn’t carry that connotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_climbing

I think you're late to make this leap.