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If going through a strongly designed process with quality gates is vibe coding, I guess so. I thought the term was reserved fir “claude, make this happen” style

If going through a strongly designed process with quality gates is vibe coding, I guess so. I thought the term was reserved fir “claude, make this happen” style development and the term for the more professional approach was “agentic development”, though this seems to be another layer higher. Grouping it all under “vibe coded” loses precision. Sure, it uses AI, but differently from other projects and with different implications.

louis-lau 15d ago
Agentic development still requires human review and human ownership of PRs. This is vibe coded. Seems precise to me.
- zachmu 14d ago
  You can call it what you want I guess, but "vibe coded" around these parts is a simple pejorative, it means the authors don't know what the code does and the product is poor quality. Most successful agent-coded projects have a few essential features that it's worth calling out: 1) The human driving it has real domain expertise; 2) There's an oracle for correctness; 3) The agent has a real-world example to copy, adapt, or translate. This project had all these elements. The human driving the agent understood the technical and product decisions that make a version-controlled database work, because he's been doing that for 8 years. The project uses the existing 5.7M query test suite for SQLite3 as its oracle, as well as adapted versions of Dolt's extensive test suite to verify the version-control features that SQLite has no tests for. And the agent had a human-written implementation of the core product (Dolt) to crib from. All of this is to say: yes, agents wrote this code, but if you or another randomly chosen software engineer sat down and tried to duplicate this result you wouldn't succeed. You wouldn't know what the agent had gotten wrong at every step of development, or even what questions to ask to find out where the errors might be. Despite the existence of a correctness oracle, the agent on its own cannot iterate to 100% correctness without a domain expert steering it. And that expert also has to have an extensive understanding of the existing code base that's being copied. You can't just say "Claude, implement version control in SQLite3, make no mistakes", it's not going to work.
  - killix 14d ago
    [flagged]

louis-lau 15d ago

Agentic development still requires human review and human ownership of PRs. This is vibe coded. Seems precise to me.

zachmu 14d ago
You can call it what you want I guess, but "vibe coded" around these parts is a simple pejorative, it means the authors don't know what the code does and the product is poor quality. Most successful agent-coded projects have a few essential features that it's worth calling out: 1) The human driving it has real domain expertise; 2) There's an oracle for correctness; 3) The agent has a real-world example to copy, adapt, or translate. This project had all these elements. The human driving the agent understood the technical and product decisions that make a version-controlled database work, because he's been doing that for 8 years. The project uses the existing 5.7M query test suite for SQLite3 as its oracle, as well as adapted versions of Dolt's extensive test suite to verify the version-control features that SQLite has no tests for. And the agent had a human-written implementation of the core product (Dolt) to crib from. All of this is to say: yes, agents wrote this code, but if you or another randomly chosen software engineer sat down and tried to duplicate this result you wouldn't succeed. You wouldn't know what the agent had gotten wrong at every step of development, or even what questions to ask to find out where the errors might be. Despite the existence of a correctness oracle, the agent on its own cannot iterate to 100% correctness without a domain expert steering it. And that expert also has to have an extensive understanding of the existing code base that's being copied. You can't just say "Claude, implement version control in SQLite3, make no mistakes", it's not going to work.
- killix 14d ago
  [flagged]