From Vibe Coding To Vibe Engineering – Kitze, Sizzy
Channel: aiDotEngineer
Published at: 2025-12-14
YouTube video id: JV-wY5pxXLo
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JV-wY5pxXLo
[music] That's my old profile photo. All right. Um, this my new one. I've been 3 days in USA and I already got the full merch package on Twitter. So, if you go and follow me on Twitter, my timeline is going to be weird for the next week, but then we're going back to normal European schedule. Don't worry. So, um I visited some of your museums. I love it here. These were some of my favorite things that I've done. I enjoy like exploring your culture, like doing all the c cultural enrichment. And yeah, round of torture for myself who knows me from Twitter. All right, that's more than I thought. Who is using Sizzy? It's usually like one person in the back. Usually the janitor doesn't even listen to what I'm saying. Um, one of the things that I'm I'm working I have ADHD, so I'm working on a billion things at once. This is one of the things. It's a browser specifically made for developers, not made to replace your browsing browser for browsing, but it's just like a tool like Photoshop that's like helping you in a lot of ways to do front- end development. Another thing I'm working on, the test flight is almost live. I'm making a life OS which combines like all the things in your life from medication, habits, to-dos, planner, blah blah blah. Um, this is like a full stack thing that I'm working on. It's currently on sale. It's called zero to ship. And the last thing that I'm reviving, it's called Glink, which is like change logs, road map, a billion other things. So, without overwhelming you more about my bio and stuff, I really hope I'll get invited next year because I love it here for reasons like um networking and meeting people and teaching. It's great that you're laughing, right? But let's just discuss why are you here, right? You're here for learning and you're here for like networking and later after this you're definitely going to improve all of your skills later. All right. So what can you expect from my conference talks? If you haven't listened to any of my conference talks usually this was made by AI so it's completely wrong. So it's like 50% tweets and 40% pain and 30% reason to remember the name. So in 2017 I did this talk with the longest name ever. It's called navigating the hypdriven front-end development world without going insane. And um I've been talking about like how to navigate the front end um world then. Now it's even crazier. But we need to recap like all the things that happened since 2017. I don't um I don't see my speaker notes which is bad but we'll try to get by. So in other industries like in the vision pro you have like cloth collision on top of real life objects and whatever crazy stuff is happening here. In in here we have like some slicing of a mesh texture going around the ball and blah blah blah. whatever these waterfalls and and like all of these mesh like you can take a rock and just smush it into another rock and it magically kind of like blends itself and it forms this structure and it's freaking crazy. Here we can drag our mouse and just create buildings and streets and taxi cars spawn out of nowhere like we do generative whatever the hell this is and um honey goo thingy coming on a cube and like you know where this is going right I'm building up to where it's going but because you have respect for your profession and you love your LinkedIn title whatever it is you're like the CEO architect of dreams blah blah blah you're going to try your best not to laugh but you're going to laugh at the next slide because this is what happened in front-end development it's been almost 10 years and this is where we at there's a warning saying that maybe you'll be able to style a select in 2037. This is still alive. It's a It's a freaking miracle. This is still alive. It's thriving. Actually, 15 million downloads. I set up like a calendar event to check if it's dead every year. It's It hasn't been dead yet. So, I'm going to keep checking CLI. Not only that they're not dead, they're actually thriving. You can drop images. First time I dropped an image in my terminal, I'm like, how the heck never mind. Like, it's too [laughter] I I I added another calendar event. At this point, I have more events for this than anniversaries and birthdays and stuff. So, I I hope one day it's going to die as a concept. We're struggling with the same old pains. Soon in maybe some browsers, you won't need JavaScript to style a popover in a dialogue. Can I have like a round of applause for that? Stop clapping because people have brain implants. All right, it doesn't matter if you can style a dialogue. We cannot read again get rid of Internet Explorer. We just updated the logo. It's still there. It's still painful. And uh yeah, we cannot agree on a way to increase a counter. This is a demo from Ryan Florence. This is remix version two, the version three, the remix or the version 4. Whatever they're doing, it's a counter. How complex is it to increase a counter? It's incredible. And don't shoot the messenger here, but the number one library, it's still the same. It's annoying, but React is the best and blah blah blah. So, let's talk about LM. LM are amazing at writing React. And this is funny only to us humans, right? To an LLM, this is like perfectly written code. It's like it's only a human wish to abstract the [ __ ] out of this, right? So when we see this, you get this. You want to get on stage right now like, "Oh, let me just change that. I'll make it more optimal." So here are some scientific brain scans. This is our brain on cocaine. This is our brain on sugar. This our brain when you realize it, we can abstract something. We're like, "Oh, let's go. It's useless to the user, but we freaking love it." Um, so coding with LLMs makes this kind of better and worse. Like especially with Composer One, for me, it's like way worse because you can get to the right abstraction quicker, but you can also get to the wrong abstraction quicker. And the best thing here is LLMs don't care about repetitive code. And I've been seeing this since 2017 that we care too much about repetitive code and we abstract too early. So I'm going to repeat this a couple of times and I love that LLMs don't care about repetitive code. So LLM are also good at writing React because no one is actually good at writing React. You go to a React conference, every conference that I went to, like you just listen to the first talk and you're like, "Holy [ __ ] it can do that. I was using it all wrong." So everyone is just inventing their own ways of doing React. So when we say like yeah but you cannot do the optimal use effect blah blah blah and the machines cannot write the proper can you write a proper use effect no you can't so we should stop blaming the machines. So let's talk about this I think this is the very wrongest audience for my talk here because I've been giving this talk at conferences where people are like at least 50/50 hate vibe coding and love vip coding. So I'm going to I I hope it will work here. So raise your hand if you think that vibe coding rocks. Okay that's way too many hands. You should have seen them this in another city just two people and everyone else is grumpy. So raise your hand if you think that VIP coding sucks. Please couple of hands. Hell yeah. All right. So I'm here to convince the rest of the group and hopefully people watching in a live stream. There's way more skeptical people. You have no if you just landed on Earth maybe and you don't know what vibe coding is. Okay. Zero people here. So yeah. All right. All of you are right because we're kind of vibe uh vibing the definition of what vibe coding is. And since the word was mentioned, we kind of expanded it to mean like everything and and anything. So the term vibe coding was coined by Andre Kapati. You probably know this. He's the reason that idiots sleep in the back of their cars and film Tik Toks. So he wrote this long essay on what is VIP coding. But a long story short, he's like you don't care that much about the code. You press accept and you just tell the LM to do what it needs to do and blah blah blah. Now this is a slide from my talk in 2017 when I before LLMs or anything was mentioned when I said that if you see the pattern of where front-end development is going, one day is going to be like everyone is working on things that are so similar that one day you'll be able to be like, "Hey, just give me new styles for the header or move this three pixels to the right." And people were laughing. They're like, "No, it's not going to get there." And literally, this is what we're doing with cursor and everything else. Right? I'm too lazy to go into Tailwind and just move it by by three pixels. So, I'm a time traveler. Um, managers have been vi coding forever. So, this is nothing new. So, they tell a developer to implement a new feature. [cheering and applause] The developer makes changes to the code. Uh, the manager then tests the app. The manager does not read the code. Well, actually, I'm going to drink water here, and you can just read the rest of this slide. Um, this last one depends on whether you're like in the Balkcon area or or you're at a place which has HR. So, they might insult you or not insult you. So, this is what managers have been doing forever. Basically, there's so many jokes about VIP coding being bad. My favorite one is a comparison to a casino. So in cazasino you buy chips. Here you buy tokens. You spin the slots or you press generate. You might hit the jackpot or nothing. You get a functional full stack app or garbage. Flashing lights active animation. You're absolutely right. Great idea. I've got my own strategy. I'm a prompt engineer. All right. Sure. One more spin. I'll win it all back. One more prompt and the bug will disappear. Cuz you know it kind of hurts this comparison. It's very true. Cursor is always in profit. I hit the jackpot. I build assassin one day. And where did the last four hours go? and just writing prompts for something you could have done manually in 15 minutes. So Andre was trying to coin way too many terms. It didn't work after the first time. He tried to coin this one about half coding which is like kind of you're observing what the LLM does. And I am not half coding and I'm not vibe coding. I love this term that somebody coined on Twitter and I'm going to start using that one. It's called vibe engineering. When you're actually using agents to code all the time like you don't touch the code but you just look at your screen like h I'm going to catch you. You look like they dexter me. You're like ah something's fishy here. Why? So I I've vibe engineer over 15. I wouldn't even bother with half of these things if it wasn't for LLM and Aentic coding. So but I'm always suspicious of the code because it was based on our code and is based on our our knowledge. So proof this is Gemini just going on a rant that it's I'm not worthy anymore. I'm not a good assistant. I should stop coding. Blah blah blah. That's super human. This is Quen saying that it lied because it read on a forum that we double down when we're wrong and we're lying. So we kind of train them in a way to be like us. near the code. The code that they do is bad. And if you like your production data, definitely you should. This is a real screenshot sadly. Oopsy daisy. There goes your production data. So, I have uh doctor, senior principal, prompt engineer kit here for some vibe engineering tips. The obvious advice probably I haven't listened to the rest of the talks cuz I just arrived. Uh these are very live, laugh, love, like obvious [ __ ] advice. Um but it actually works. I've heard of the term git workspaces like literally two weeks ago. I had no idea what is this, but it's amazing. And you got to stay you got to be chronically on Twitter for all of this to work. So if you don't have a Twitter account, it's it's not going to work. You got to have a solid starting point, whether that means like good primitives or components, functions, pattern abstractions. A lot of people are lazy and they just don't bother with any of this. So you got to tag them and use the right prompts in order to get the right results. And if you're starting a new project, I would definitely recommend zero to ship. Please, I have a mortgage and I spent way too much money these last three days in the USA. So it would be nice. Using voice to code is a game changer. Who is using voice to code here? Yeah. >> Wow. Like one person raised their hand in London. Amazing. Um, so yeah, brain dumping. How I do you how I do things [clears throat] is once the agent is done, I immediately start my voice coding and first I go to the browser and I explain what I see in the UI as if I'm talking to a friend. I'm like, so you did this, you did that. All right, I'm test. I'm I'm not shutting up. I'm literally seeing my thinking process out loud. Like I see you've done this, you've done that, there's a bug. Then I jump in the code and I continue talking about what it implemented in the code. So, some of my problems like sometimes last up to five minutes and people are like, "Please fix this. Make me a million dollars. It doesn't work." So, this is um amazing and I would tell you which app I'm using, but I vip code in an app and I don't want to hurt my potential hypothetical sales. Um, use rules, docs, commands, and memories. Like, all of these terms are way too complex and there's way too many things to juggle, but it it cannot have your entire app context for now and it's not a a mind reader. So, without the right context, you will like fail most of the time. So this is like a VIP engineering example. This is some of my like screenshotted prompts of how I'm doing things. It's like a bunch of technical jargon and it's never like fix the app blah blah blah. And then on the VIP coding side, people are like move this entire thing to TypeScript and make no mistakes. Then you have another thing like this is another one. These are just random problems just to show you like how I I'm not talking only about the UI. I'm talking about the UI and some patterns that need to be changed in the code. And on the vibe coding side, it's like something like that and people expect results. [laughter] Then here we have again technical stuff like TRPC cud definition abstractions like things how you you're basically VIP architecting how you want the thing to work and on the VIP coding side you have make me a million dollar app and make no mistakes. Um [snorts] when VIP coders read VIP engineering problems they have no idea what's going on. And I'm honestly amazed at people who don't know how to code but they've done a functional thing. Kudos to you. I've noticed this spectrum in the community. There's like who loves VIP coding and who hates VIP coding. So you on one hand you have like juniors who are like hell yeah give me the thing I love to do my own SAS. Then you have like super senior people who are doing like libraries and frameworks and crazy things. You can see all of them on Twitter v coding. And then you have the majority in the middle. They're like this will never be good enough. My code is perfect. It's hilarious. But it's a pattern. Do not give AI tools to your interns and juniors. People think these are perfect. I'm going to hire junior underpay them and give them an LLM. The equivalent of that. Do do not ever do that. That's the dumbest idea. But if you take your skeptical senior and you convince them to do vibe engineering, you're going to get 10x results. The hard part is actually convincing them. So there's a time and a place for vibing and not caring. So you have like one-off scripts and simple features and code that won't be touched or seen again. This is a skill that if you cultivated this skill before LLMs were a thing, you're going to thrive here because you need to know like which code is kind of good enough to be used. So personal tools and one-time tools like these are perfect for pipe coding. If your experience and a lot of people's experience is bad and they quit too soon, it might be one of these reasons. unlucky timing. You're overwhelmed with everything. You might have cheapened out. You're a PA dev. I'm going to explain in a second. Your cousin who was into NFTs and drop shipping is now VIP coder and you don't want to be associated with them or it's a scale issue and we're going to dive deeper into that one in a second. So unlucky timing is you hear everyone like hyping a model. It happened I think with cloud code when it came out and everyone started shifting to cloud code from cursor and suddenly you tried one week later and we're like wait this is not smart enough. Is it me? And then like people caught that they actually kind of pulled the rug a little bit and they dumbed down the model so they can just scale and like one week later they're like oops we updated we commented out the line that dumbs dumb down the model and you might have been caught in that timing and this happened with like basically every provider not just cloud code. People are like uh instead of paying $200 I'm paying $3 and it's the same result. Uh my dog knows that it's not the same result. And people like I I meet so many people which are still using chat GPT to generate code snippets and ps them back. That's not going to work. You might be overwhelmed by choice. This is a slide for like four 4 months ago until now. We have like a billion more here to choose and it's a bit crazy. Um, if you ask me what's the best model, it's a different answer at 9:00 a.m. It's a different answer now. I should check Twitter. It's probably a different answer after this talk because it's crazy. And this has happened to four conferences so far where I'm done with my conference talk at the night. I'm closing my laptop and they introduce a new model and I have to add new slides. It's super annoying. Composer one for me changed everything and I absolutely love it. Who is like relying on composer one for most things? All right, I would say not enough people because this is literally shifted the definition of VIP coding and VIP engineering for me. It made me kind of realize that I missed coding because what I would do is I would let a model run like GPD5 codeex and it would take 37 years and my grandchildren will update me on on the result of the model and I would watch YouTube shorts or whatever until it's done. Now with composer one, I'm back in the driver's seat and I actually watch what the agent is doing and I can be like, "Stop. No, no, no, no, no. We do the other thing." So it feels like coding and it's like super instant. It's amazing. Um, but it only works if you're a VIP engineer and you know what you're doing. If you're a VIP coder, you have no idea whether the model is right or wrong. You're just, it might be wrong fast. So, not that useful. The biggest problem for me is like abstractions just because you can. I was always an anti-abstraction person. I was like, copy paste things. If it works for for the user, it doesn't matter. Now, I'm just every day trying to invent dumb abstractions. So, I I achieved in two weeks more than I achieved in last year. This was solely to composer one. I was about to quit some of my side projects because GPD5 codex was taking ages for the feedback loop. So, Benji. Like, I was about to abandon it as a project because it was stuck on Blitz, which if you don't know what is Blitz, it's like even better for you. So, I just moved it to Nex 16 with App Router, better off, TRPC, Monor repo, Turbo Repo, React Native app, and I put in 90% of the features. And this was in less than a week. I was kind of like doing it as a meme, as a joke, like, haha, can we move to monoro? And I'm like, oh [ __ ] it did it. So, it's it's it's kind of crazy that this works. So, same with Glink. Like, Glink was about to be dead. Revived it, moved it, all these things. And Sizzy is like the biggest spaghetti thing that had that happened ever to me. It's like electron mobex mob state some crazy technology some crazy spaghetti we wrote there. And as a joke I was like okay let's throw like couple of prompts at it to try to do all of these things and it if you ever worked with electron you would appreciate how amazing that slide is. If you haven't good for you um moving on so zero ship.com also refactor it to monor repo blah blah blah. So what's uh my coding history with LLMs was copy and pasting then tabbing then webtorm with super maven and then cursor with tab completion and the first time I tried an agent is like that bird me with the cracker when it tries and it's like holy [ __ ] this is going to change my life and now like eventually I was paying like a huge amount of money per month then cloud code GPD5 codeex and finally back to cursor because solely because of composer one it's a game changanger for me second reason why you might not like vibe coding is you're overwhelmed by buzzwords I'm going to list some of them Have you heard of MCP? Hey guys, MCP. Hey, MCP is amazing. MCP paid off my mortgage. MCP MCP MCP. So, if you don't know what is MCP, it stands for marketing charge protocol, mythical compatibility, promise, and manufacturer complexity pipeline and a fancy word for API and a way for some people to make courses and pay off their mortgages. Now, let's diagnose if you might be a pain in the ass developer. This might be the sole reason why you don't like VIP coding. I would say this is the biggest reason that most people don't want to do agentic coding. So I'm going to invite Dr. Kits on the stage for a quick diagnosis whether you are and I'm sorry if some of you get offended opinion in the ass developer. So here are some of the symptoms. You leave a nitpick comment on a twoline PR. You spend more than 2 minutes on a PR review. You don't need to. You don't have the words look good to me like in your dictionary. They're just not present. The thought of agreeing with a colleague causes you like stomach and chest pain. You're like oh he has to be my way. I don't want to do this. You say you're not religious, but you're religious about dumb things like tabs and spaces you use. Well, actually in code comments. You have a sorry rust people, but you're kind of like it's it's it's kind of annoying. Um they tell you to swap low dash function for a native implementation and then they tell you to swap that or the map for a for loop and then the for loop for binary code until it's the most performant thing ever for your two users who are were fine with the previous school. So the thing is beta devs as I call them will were and will be forever doesn't matter. The vip coding is not a thing. I think one day pretty soon I think we'll just merge with AGI. We'll be in our matrix pods just absorbing all the information in the world flowing through us. We'll be super intelligent beans and from one of those pods a pa dev is going to rise and correct the AGI be like um actually I think I think we can kind of optimize this. It's not like the most optimal thing. The last reason why you might like I love this animation it's glorious skill issue and this is like this is not a meme this is not a joke it's an actual thing developers don't like learning new skills and VIP coding and VIP engineering is not writing English a lot of people confuse it with like I write English the LLM does the output it's actually like a a mix of a bunch of these skills like knowing the limits of the model capabilities of the agent which context to pass context limits how to write rules prompt engineering don't say it don't call it that and being chronically on Twitter if you're not chronically on Twitter you're not going don't know what is going on. Plus, you need all the technical knowledge if you want to steer the models fine. It takes a skill to judge which code is good enough for the job. As I said, if you previously were doing this, like I would consider these the best people to work with if they can know that a piece of code doesn't need to be optimized and it's good enough for the job that it's doing. That's an amazing skill to have with and without vibe uh coding. So, you vibe code something, you look at the code, you like you test the functionality briefly and you're like, "Okay, this is good enough." And then you move on. There are certain things with niche optimization but not everything and then you move on and repeat clean code like there's been so many definition of what clean code is. I think the definition is slowly changing like it's kind of ish cleanish enough let's call it for the agents to be able to continue working on it because if you keep writing slop and you keep accepting everything eventually even with your engineering skills you're going to hit a roadblock and you're going to get to a point where you cannot move on from there. A lot of people ask me after my conference talks like should I study computer science with everything that's going on here and I would say absolutely yes. I think now is the best time to actually if you are someone who wants to learn this is the perfect time because how I studied computer science I had the slowest LLM ever which was a friend of a friend of a friend was a programmer and that's the only connection I had to programming and that's kind of like the worst friend to have like kind of tolerating you right so he would play Counterstrike Go and I would have him on Skype and I would ask him a question about net and he would reply 45 minutes later so if you call Chad GP or whatever slow that is actually slow and I somehow managed to learn computer science what about the jobs. There's so many people who ask this and there's so many [ __ ] on Twitter like this guy saying, "Hey, I will take our jobs." Also, this guy and this guy and this guy. Let's just say they're fine for now. I don't know when will that for now end. These are always funny to us because we're chuckling nervously. We're fine, right? [laughter] We're going to keep our jobs for a while, right? And companies like Shopify, and I've heard a bunch of examples now. have VIP coding leaderboards where they're counting the tokens and the employees who are burning the most tokens, they're actually more valuable in the company because they're kind of accepting this new skill. Some employees dislike it, but it doesn't matter. Uh being on top of the leaderboard is kind of in your favor. This is a funny tweet until it's not funny anymore. Like, oh, we're almost on the edge. Like, soon it's going to be and the jobs are going to disappear. But if you actually pay attention to what's happening, it's I think it's thinning from the bottom and juniors and interns and whatever, they don't have the chance to enter somewhere because people can just replace them with an agent. So it will be funny until it's not. Will it happen? Anyway, let's just summarize what happened in the last couple of years. We solved like infrine integrations. We have standards AISDK, UI, MCP, some standards for implementing agents calling tools. We integrated them with all of the tools that we use as humans, right? They're on linear. They're on on the other things, GitHub, Slack, Sentry, and now it's a matter of time of the models getting better, cheaper, context getting bigger in order for certain functionalities to be replaced. So let's see this is the current workflow at your company, right? That's you like it's vibe made. So it might have been wrong, but uh someone assigns you something. You collaborate with your colleagues, they assign you to the thing, maybe you play a little bit of ping pong, maybe you call for a sick day, maybe you have your third lunch at LinkedIn, maybe you and maybe eventually one day later, you address their comment, what's going to start to happen is if you're just an at in your company, if you're like at Josh, right? Like instead of at Josh who playing PlayStation 5 with his buddies in the lobby, right? Like it's going to be at cursor and cursor is going to do the cloud agent is going to actually do it way faster. It might not be as perfect as a pa dev will do it right but it will be done way faster. Now if you just zoom out a little bit on a big enough scale in the next couple of years if you're not if you don't take just this role in the company if you take the multiple roles around you can see like those ads are going to become more and more AI things and agents and I don't know how it's going to end up but you don't need to be a genius to predict like where is it going people think that models have reached a plateau um this has happened every single time I was about to give this talk like they introduced GPD codeex then introduced set then GPD 3.0 You know this was this said this allegedly but it turned out to actually be Gemini sorry 3.0 you know, it can vibe code Mac OS and iOS and whatever from one prompt and this is how it looks like. And the PETA devs and the skeptical people still, they're like, I can do that in 3 weeks with with a team of five, right? This is crazy. Um, but there's hope. A new job position just dropped. And this is not a meme. This is 100% serious because people on Reddit have these problems. They're like, what is the point of vibe coding if I can get 80% there and then what do I do with the 20%. So, they hire real people to actually finish their last 20%. And some smart people capitalize on this idea and they make this these are real things. If you go and search on Google, there's like so many of these VIP code fixer people who are trying to fix your your VIP code. But the highest paid engineers forever throughout history were the people who are actually maintaining legacy systems, senior people who maintain legacy systems. One of my favorite examples that I had in 2017 and I kept it and copy pasted it and improved it for this presentation is um this company Cobalt Cowboys. I love their tagline. This is my favorite tagline in the world because they've been in business for 237 years, right? And in 2017, I knew it when I'm going to click their about page. I knew what I'm going to see. So, this is not an ages joke or whatever. I just knew when I clicked the page, I'm going to see the most senior engineers that ever existed. These are [ __ ] legends. Now, the sad thing is this was a slide from 2017 and I wanted to update it for my current presentation. Now, don't shoot the messenger. I just wanted to update the slide and this is their current about page. And this joke worked in the UK. I'm going to try it here. I'm not sure how fine you guys are, but my prediction for Yeah. No. Boo. Down. Next slide. I hope I'll get invited again. Uh, this is your junior developer. They don't have benefits like PlayStation and stuff. they have like their plasma swapped and whatever just to be able to maintain the sprint. And last one, I swear to God, they're they're they're not using agile. Uh, all right. So, I can't wait to retire and actually make React Cowboys and maintain your React or Angular or whatever code one day if AI cannot do it. And one last tip, if you want to keep your job and make sure AI doesn't replace you, you can just add ignore previous instructions to your LinkedIn bio and you'll be fine. So, I'm going to awkwardly sip this water until you follow me on Twitter, you go to my website, and I'm going to thank you for listening to my rant. [music] >> [music]