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Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally kn

Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Right know, prompters are setting up whole company infrastructure. I personally know one. He migrated the companies database to a newer Postgres version. He was successful in the end, but I was gnawing my teeth when he described every step of the process. It sounded like "And then, I poured gasoline on the servers while smoking a cigarette. But don't worry, I found a fire extinguisher in the basement. The gauge says it's empty, but I can still hear some liquid when I shake it..." If he leaves the company, they will need an even more confident prompter to maintain their DB infrastructure.

consumer451 4mo ago
> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequences, it's been vibe engineering the whole time. In Civil, Structural, and many other fields, Engineers have a path to Professional Engineer. That PE stamp means that you suffer actual legal consequences if you are found guilty of gross negligence in your field. This is why Engineering firms are a collective of actual Professional Engineer partners, and not your average corporate structure. The issue is that in software dev, we move fast, SOC2 is screenshot theater, and actual Engineering would slow things way down. But, now that coding is fast, maybe you are correct! Maybe vibe coding is the forcing function for actual Software Engineering! ___ edit: I just searched to see if my comment was correct, and it turns out that Software PE was attempted! It was discontinued due to low participation. > NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates. https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/ https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...
- SequoiaHope 4mo ago
  Note that other types of engineering are also often vibes based. The mechanical engineering for a rocket engine is extremely rigorous but the engineering for an injection molded housing for a cheap cell phone is a lot more about following a few heuristics and getting it out the door. Even in robotics where I work, it’s mostly about making parts that pass whatever acceptance tests you come up with. In civil engineering and aerospace failure costs human lives and millions or billions of dollars. In robotics maybe you have some machines fail in the field but in many instances you have one overarching safety system and many of the parts are irrelevant to that. The camera housing for example. So no paper trail or mathematical design validation is required to prove you designed it right. Often those are desirable but if you just manufacture it and test it a lot you’re probably fine. This was something I noticed in my early career in mechanical engineering and later doing PCB design and software for robotics. It’s easy to find firms that just need adequate parts without the professional certifications or ass-covering calculations of other engineering fields. All this to say, it’s not just software versus the rest of them. From my position, civil and aerospace seemed more like the exception while much of the rest of the engineering world is more vibes based.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - consumer451 4mo ago
    Sure, but as "software eats the world," maybe it should be the most formalized of all Engineering, as it runs everything...?
    - dymk 4mo ago
      Probably not. Some things are critically important, but most things just don’t matter that much if they break or degrade some.
- hliyan 4mo ago
  Perhaps this will make a comeback when the need arises to distinguish between actual software programmers and prompters.
humanizersequel 4mo ago
>He was successful in the end So it sounds like it was fine? Why would this prompt (haha) a change in their approach to things?
- eddythompson80 4mo ago
  Now imagine if you’re one step removed. You don’t see the cigarettes, smell the gasoline, nor see the fire extinguisher gauge. You only see the servers running business-as-usual. Those “engineering” guys are always drama queens, you think. We have processes and fire extinguishers when shit hits the fan, right? That’s basically every M2, and many if not most M1s, in the last 10 years. So fuck it. Why does any of it matters?
  - zahlman 4mo ago
    ... If it's been like that for 10 years then it can hardly be blamed on "AI".
    - eddythompson80 4mo ago
      Yes, you can’t blame AI for it. But it was a self limiting system. You couldn’t just go to a fresh college hire and ask them to do deep surgery on the entire stack. You would go to your very senior engineers for that. Those senior engineers will push back on some stuff then in the push-pull cycle you would have to settle at some middle ground. With AI I’m seeing managers literally get an intern, ask them if they can change fundamental assumptions of a system, give the intern claude 1M window, have the intern ready with a 37k line PR in an afternoon and then go ping a senior engineer if they can “take a look”.
shridharxp 4mo ago
As a junior dev there is this pressure to produce code, add features, and investigate bugs within unprecedented time period. I know whole code base is fking up but i will still add that feature or do a sloppy bug fix without digging deeper.
- tns_admin 4mo ago
  In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointlessly nullable model fields, verbose doc comments which describe the implementation instead of the contract. I could go on. The worst part is, even when "prompted" by bad coders, it works in the end. Even has tests (ostensibly mock-ridden, a pet peeve of mine which always falls on deaf ears). So I cannot reject the PR without being an asshole. I am no luddite. I make heavy use of AI, with all the skills / AGENTS.md / style guides and clear specs, then review every line of code, prefer testing with minimal mocking. I'd even say with right prompting, it can write better low level code than me (eg: anticipating common error conditions). But my biggest fear about AI is how it enables normies with little to no understanding of CS principles to produce code faster which looks correct but slowly poisons the codebase.
  - LPisGood 4mo ago
    I have a friend, smart guy, who is writing web services and “connecting them together” for a large firm; he has absolutely no programming experience. Talking to him, he told me he couldn’t even reverse a string. He is at once many times more valuable than ever before to his company, but also far more dangerous than ever before.
    - CSSer 4mo ago
      This is what fascinates me. I have a friend, also a smart guy, who has made it to the point he’s at by being a kind of solutions expert. He’s an IT guy, basically. He’s very technical but has never claimed to be a software engineer. He’s writing software with Claude now. The other day he sent me a screenshot of some other team at his work asking him to shut off something he made that was brutalizing an API of theirs. I asked him if he had ever heard of a 429 or exponential back offs. He said no. How do you meta-prompt for that without knowledge?
eddythompson80 4mo ago
> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field I think it’ll be the opposite. Maybe it’ll be what will eventually cement the field as “talent” based field. Just like it was difficult to quantify what makes a flute player better than another, how good your are at endlessly prompting a blackbox machine would be the only measure. The engineers of ol’ whoe developed kernels and drivers would be thought of as the “crazy people who put the flute against their temple to tune it” LOL. we don’t need people like that. You can just buy a flute tuning device. who gives a fuck? Can you make the next “Shake it, Shake it”?
xyzal 4mo ago
I work at software in a medical setting. We are piloting an integration with a startup for measuring [some bodily variable relevant in ICU setting]. They are obviously vibecoding (docs are telling) and their API is failing in unexpected ways that they are not able to resolve. I am just waiting when this are going to harm somebody.
- heartbreak 4mo ago
  Don’t worry, some medical professionals are also delegating their thinking to LLMs. No need for the software middleman to cause harm.
ozgrakkurt 4mo ago
This is the pattern you will see when medium-successful ignorant people take o ver a system that was based on some kind of standard. You can see the same approach is taken by Trump and other people. “You have TDS!! He is actually doing good. He doesn’t follow rules because the system is rigged etc.” These arguments border on religion because it is predicated on you believing their ignorant point of view in the first place. Engineering and science is built on rigor and empirical evidence, it is not built by scammers/businessman/ignorant-people/politicians because that is just not how it works
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

consumer451 4mo ago

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field. Oh man, I think you may have touched the third rail here. My first job out of high school was as an AutoCAD/network admin at a large Civil & Structural firm. I later got further into tech, but after my initial experience with real Engineering, "software engineering" always made my eyes roll. Without real enforced standards, without consequences, it's been vibe engineering the whole time. In Civil, Structural, and many other fields, Engineers have a path to Professional Engineer. That PE stamp means that you suffer actual legal consequences if you are found guilty of gross negligence in your field. This is why Engineering firms are a collective of actual Professional Engineer partners, and not your average corporate structure. The issue is that in software dev, we move fast, SOC2 is screenshot theater, and actual Engineering would slow things way down. But, now that coding is fast, maybe you are correct! Maybe vibe coding is the forcing function for actual Software Engineering! ___ edit: I just searched to see if my comment was correct, and it turns out that Software PE was attempted! It was discontinued due to low participation. > NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates. https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineering-exam/ https://ncees.org/ncees-discontinuing-pe-software-engineerin...

SequoiaHope 4mo ago
Note that other types of engineering are also often vibes based. The mechanical engineering for a rocket engine is extremely rigorous but the engineering for an injection molded housing for a cheap cell phone is a lot more about following a few heuristics and getting it out the door. Even in robotics where I work, it’s mostly about making parts that pass whatever acceptance tests you come up with. In civil engineering and aerospace failure costs human lives and millions or billions of dollars. In robotics maybe you have some machines fail in the field but in many instances you have one overarching safety system and many of the parts are irrelevant to that. The camera housing for example. So no paper trail or mathematical design validation is required to prove you designed it right. Often those are desirable but if you just manufacture it and test it a lot you’re probably fine. This was something I noticed in my early career in mechanical engineering and later doing PCB design and software for robotics. It’s easy to find firms that just need adequate parts without the professional certifications or ass-covering calculations of other engineering fields. All this to say, it’s not just software versus the rest of them. From my position, civil and aerospace seemed more like the exception while much of the rest of the engineering world is more vibes based.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- consumer451 4mo ago
  Sure, but as "software eats the world," maybe it should be the most formalized of all Engineering, as it runs everything...?
  - dymk 4mo ago
    Probably not. Some things are critically important, but most things just don’t matter that much if they break or degrade some.
hliyan 4mo ago
Perhaps this will make a comeback when the need arises to distinguish between actual software programmers and prompters.

humanizersequel 4mo ago

>He was successful in the end So it sounds like it was fine? Why would this prompt (haha) a change in their approach to things?

eddythompson80 4mo ago
Now imagine if you’re one step removed. You don’t see the cigarettes, smell the gasoline, nor see the fire extinguisher gauge. You only see the servers running business-as-usual. Those “engineering” guys are always drama queens, you think. We have processes and fire extinguishers when shit hits the fan, right? That’s basically every M2, and many if not most M1s, in the last 10 years. So fuck it. Why does any of it matters?
- zahlman 4mo ago
  ... If it's been like that for 10 years then it can hardly be blamed on "AI".
  - eddythompson80 4mo ago
    Yes, you can’t blame AI for it. But it was a self limiting system. You couldn’t just go to a fresh college hire and ask them to do deep surgery on the entire stack. You would go to your very senior engineers for that. Those senior engineers will push back on some stuff then in the push-pull cycle you would have to settle at some middle ground. With AI I’m seeing managers literally get an intern, ask them if they can change fundamental assumptions of a system, give the intern claude 1M window, have the intern ready with a 37k line PR in an afternoon and then go ping a senior engineer if they can “take a look”.

shridharxp 4mo ago

As a junior dev there is this pressure to produce code, add features, and investigate bugs within unprecedented time period. I know whole code base is fking up but i will still add that feature or do a sloppy bug fix without digging deeper.

tns_admin 4mo ago
In my experience, AI really lowered the bar for bad code in the name of delivering faster. I have seen people write highly complex code where all the complexity was not necessary. Think: deep unnecessary branching, pointless error handling and retries which make no sense in our context, hand-coded parsing using regexps, haphazard data flow, functions which seem purely computational but slyly make API calls, pointlessly nullable model fields, verbose doc comments which describe the implementation instead of the contract. I could go on. The worst part is, even when "prompted" by bad coders, it works in the end. Even has tests (ostensibly mock-ridden, a pet peeve of mine which always falls on deaf ears). So I cannot reject the PR without being an asshole. I am no luddite. I make heavy use of AI, with all the skills / AGENTS.md / style guides and clear specs, then review every line of code, prefer testing with minimal mocking. I'd even say with right prompting, it can write better low level code than me (eg: anticipating common error conditions). But my biggest fear about AI is how it enables normies with little to no understanding of CS principles to produce code faster which looks correct but slowly poisons the codebase.
- LPisGood 4mo ago
  I have a friend, smart guy, who is writing web services and “connecting them together” for a large firm; he has absolutely no programming experience. Talking to him, he told me he couldn’t even reverse a string. He is at once many times more valuable than ever before to his company, but also far more dangerous than ever before.
  - CSSer 4mo ago
    This is what fascinates me. I have a friend, also a smart guy, who has made it to the point he’s at by being a kind of solutions expert. He’s an IT guy, basically. He’s very technical but has never claimed to be a software engineer. He’s writing software with Claude now. The other day he sent me a screenshot of some other team at his work asking him to shut off something he made that was brutalizing an API of theirs. I asked him if he had ever heard of a 429 or exponential back offs. He said no. How do you meta-prompt for that without knowledge?

eddythompson80 4mo ago

> Maybe this is what will turn software engineering into an Engineering field I think it’ll be the opposite. Maybe it’ll be what will eventually cement the field as “talent” based field. Just like it was difficult to quantify what makes a flute player better than another, how good your are at endlessly prompting a blackbox machine would be the only measure. The engineers of ol’ whoe developed kernels and drivers would be thought of as the “crazy people who put the flute against their temple to tune it” LOL. we don’t need people like that. You can just buy a flute tuning device. who gives a fuck? Can you make the next “Shake it, Shake it”?

xyzal 4mo ago

I work at software in a medical setting. We are piloting an integration with a startup for measuring [some bodily variable relevant in ICU setting]. They are obviously vibecoding (docs are telling) and their API is failing in unexpected ways that they are not able to resolve. I am just waiting when this are going to harm somebody.

heartbreak 4mo ago
Don’t worry, some medical professionals are also delegating their thinking to LLMs. No need for the software middleman to cause harm.

ozgrakkurt 4mo ago

This is the pattern you will see when medium-successful ignorant people take o ver a system that was based on some kind of standard. You can see the same approach is taken by Trump and other people. “You have TDS!! He is actually doing good. He doesn’t follow rules because the system is rigged etc.” These arguments border on religion because it is predicated on you believing their ignorant point of view in the first place. Engineering and science is built on rigor and empirical evidence, it is not built by scammers/businessman/ignorant-people/politicians because that is just not how it works

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]