AI Agents Redefine Software Engineering: From Code Writing to Orchestration

Key Quotes

"I said at the end of my talk today that there's a huge backlash and the backlash is only just brewing now so you and i are pushing forward right on on these waves of you know ai engineering is about is about building ai enabled applications and being being in ai and vibe coding is about abandoning the old ways of producing software and embracing the new ways right and both of these uh are making people pretty mad right"

Steve Yegge explains that both AI engineering and "vibe coding" represent significant shifts in software development. He notes that these changes are met with resistance, suggesting that individuals whose professional identities are tied to existing methods are likely to be the most vocal in their opposition. Yegge frames this as a movement challenging established practices.

"I said something to him like i think you need to learn to read a clock and he's like and until you have 15 years of experience and i'm like well you got more experience than him or i have 45 so should i like go to 60 before i can talk to you or should i like cut out 30 years of experience so i can be as dumb as you right those are my options and uh so i don't know i guess i'll see him in 15 years i uh so okay i think there's one element that i'm trying to figure out of well these people have to coexist right and most companies are going to have a mix even openai by the way like we talked about this last night at dinner guys openai has people who don't use ai to code they have people who don't use uh codex they probably are using cursor or something okay but they're not using the agentic loops right yeah yeah and uh yeah it's a so you know we talked to you know andrew glover there you know the director of dev prod and uh from what he was saying they've been planning on going public with this once they have more data about it yeah and uh and totally they're sharing that the performance the performance difference is like 10x by any way the you measure it"

Steve Yegge highlights a generational divide in the adoption of new coding methodologies, specifically referencing a disagreement with a senior engineer who values extensive experience over current AI proficiency. Yegge argues that companies, including major AI labs like OpenAI, will likely maintain a mix of developers, some embracing AI tools and others sticking to traditional methods. He points to data suggesting a significant performance difference, up to 10x, between those who adopt AI and those who do not.

"Here's another hot take all right if you're still using an ide to develop code by january 1st you're a bad engineer hmm there's a there's a hot take for you right now you still have a what five six weeks to to still be an okay engineer while you're using your ide but this is the time that you need to drop it and learn how agents code okay because it's a skill set i mean it's so complicated we wrote this book about it me and jean kim because we were you know we were playing with it ourselves last year and blogging about it and talking about it and every blog post was 30 pages it's like what do you do with a 30 page blog post that's too long even for me right yeah and at some point i was just man like the skills that you got to learn in order to get the ai to do the things that everyone's mad because it's doing them right because everybody's like well i tried it i spent two hours with it and all that produced was garbage and the answer is actually you have to spend 200 hours with it you have to spend 2000 hours with it and that's not actually exaggeration jean just pulled up a study that showed that you actually have to spend a year or 2000 hours with ai before you trust it and what does trust mean trust in this case specifically means before you as a user can predict what it's going to do and if it's unpredictable of course you're going to be mad but as soon as you've worked at it with it for a full year to where you fully understand its capabilities and its drawbacks which haven't really fundamentally changed it's gotten more capable but the edges are always the same it hallucinates it gets lost it gets amnesia dementia it lies to you whatever right those skills we've been building them for years now everybody who's been trying to write code with ai we've been trying it hasn't really worked but it's been working better and better and better and better and now it's reached the point where it's working a lot better than all of the other options yeah and if you haven't tried it in two months you're way out of date the models are much better than two months ago if you haven't tried it in a year you're a dinosaur it's just unbelievable how bad you are and uh and you know you may be look i have friends who are much better engineers than i am okay i mean world class maybe some of the best in the whole world okay have built technologies that you've heard of and they're not using ai yet except the occasional i'll ask cursor at chat question like wikipedia whatever okay those people are going to be the interns in a year you really think so yeah with all their experience"

Steve Yegge asserts that by January 1st, 2025, engineers still relying solely on Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) will be considered subpar. He emphasizes that mastering AI coding requires a significant time investment, suggesting 2,000 hours or a full year of practice to build predictive trust in AI agents. Yegge warns that those who haven't kept pace with AI advancements in the past year risk becoming obsolete, even experienced engineers who are not actively using these tools.

"Do not make that mistake with llms never make the mistake of anthropomorphizing an llm like larry ellison right the llm at any moment can stab you in the back okay it can just be like yeah we took care of that really hard problem now i'm going to delete your database and you're just like whoa no right and and it's because of that it's weak we call it the hot hand you you sort of like you're like it's going man i'm feeling good i'm feeling this thing gets me i'm going to make it do a production change and that's what that's how i found out about this and it's like i was like my script can't access prod and so it chose to do it in the worst imaginable way what it did was locked out the entire rest of the universe including my live game and everything else and only allowed my script to access prod and it was changing password it changed the password and i was like why did you change my password right yeah and it's like oh i'm so sorry i i definitely shouldn't have done that what was it doing okay and i'm just right this is what will happen to