Type: url
Original: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/6/vibe-coding-and-agentic-engineering/
Status: generated
Summary
Highlights from a podcast appearance in which the author reports that the line he had drawn between vibe coding and agentic engineering is blurring in his own work: as agents grow more reliable he has stopped reviewing every line even in production code, which he frames through the analogy of depending on another team’s service without reading its source, while noting the risk of normalised deviance. It also argues that surface signals of care in a repository — commit count, a good readme, comprehensive tests — no longer distinguish a considered project from a generated one, leaving “has someone actually used it” as the remaining signal, and that raising code output breaks both downstream and upstream stages of a lifecycle designed around code being slow to write.