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Ask HN: Do you find vibe coding / agentic engineering to be fulfilling?

14 points by uejfiweun ↗ HN
I'm having trouble reaching that golden "builder" zone when I use things like Claude Code. It's cool to be able to conjure software from scratch using these tools, but the output... I don't know, it just doesn't really feel like something I myself did. Maybe it's the lack of effort required, or maybe it's the fact that I know in the back of my head that basically anyone could copy this with the right prompt, that software in general is no longer a special thing.

Has anyone been able to find that "zone of fulfillment" using these tools? Because I'd love to find it again.

19 comments

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jazz9k
If you want fulfillment, make your own side projects. Most companies will start requiring some form of LLM for development, and they don't really care how you get to the end goal.
Febriss33
can't it shift from just building a software to create a new "skill"? for non dev people its just easier to see it in this way.. fullfilling may come with the possibility to create some idea you can't bring to life before vibes. i'm vibe coding and i would be fullfilled if i could achieve reliability on an llm!!
mmarian
Think of this as yet another abstraction layer. People didn't give up on building web applications just because Python with Django can do it much faster than C. Be more ambitious with your projects!
carlosjobim
I want a program, I don't want to program.
kamphey
Help people. Just make sure you're focused on helping people with software. Doing something useful for them. Doesn't matter who/what coded it. were we really writing code anyways? Coding languages are abstractions.

Just get to the heart of what people want. Talk to people and help them. Most humans on Earth, at least, aren't technical.

I find that internal frustrations are solved by external validation. Seeing someone happy and joyful from my work, makes it all worth it.

DantesKite
I do find vibe coding fulfilling. Very much so. But not in the way someone who gets into a flow state with coding typically does.

Why? Because I can finally make rapid progress on ideas I've had that would have taken me years to develop by myself. I enjoy the outputs. Only the outputs.

There is genuinely no flow state for me. It is a grinding list of frustrations I handle whenever the agent falls short of my expectations.

It is assembly work in that sense. I am an order of magnitude more productive, but the work itself is not intrinsically enjoyable the way coding used to be.

I am a factory worker churning out features as I monitor the LLM agent and its outputs. There is no craft. Only productivity.

I do not mind because I was never a very competent programmer to begin with, so there is no major loss on my part. This black box produces what I truly want, but I will not pretend it has any meaning for me. It provides no more meaning to me than cranking a lever for hours on end.

But I love seeing my ideas come to life. These distant dreams I had only in my head are suddenly walking and breathing after years of only thinking about them.

daemonologist
No. I feel the same way, and have started moving to only do hardware-focused side projects. (I would say this works out nicely because I had several ideas on standby, but their cost has gone up 3-4x due to current memory and storage prices, which is I guess sort of depressingly poetic.)
cedws
No. I get bored and quickly drop vibe coded projects.
hapticdata
The effort and time that I invested in romanticizing writing code as an intellectual and poetic pursuit feels kinda silly now but still pays dividends. Now I get to explore lots of ideas or the scale of ideas that I previously wouldn't have and I find lots of joy in those moments but I've had to learn to give up on certain types of value systems and can get bored of the process of forever sharpening an arrow.
mic_sm
One of the problems is a lack of architectural memory in LLM's context.
PJHkorea
In vibe coding, you must simultaneously address two things: tuning the AI and reviewing your own results.

You think it is easy because your ability to tune the AI is excellent, but in reality, you are intuitively and easily doing things that others cannot.

rkochanowski
I think "lack of effort required" is the key.

We can just throw prompts without understanding and caring about output. This way we can build something in 10 min we don't own.

We can also do real engineering with our architecture design, thinking about what exactly are we building and why, being critical about produced output. This way of building takes more time, but this is something we built ourselves and can be potentially more fulfilling. And this is not something anyone can copy with right prompt. There are more nuances than AI-generated code.

Another way to find fulfillment is to focus more on solving a real problem and building something people will use. Less on writing a code.

sageserpent
I've never vibe-coded anything from scratch, but I do use the likes of Claude and Jules to work on my own open source projects.

All of these have a couple of thousand commits that I'd done myself over the years, so I don't have that sense of "what has been built and what's my contribution?".

What I find very fulfilling is to finally get to have drudge-work tickets that I'd put off for ages done. It's nice to be able to pair-program with the LLM as well, I rather enjoy the back-and-forth of ideas - I'm sometimes pleasantly surprised by how insightful an LLM can be. Pair-programming / reviewing keeps that sense of involvement going, in fact it accentuates it somewhat, because I have to keep on top of what the LLM is doing.

The novelty of conversing with a synthetic quasi-intelligence hasn't worn off yet, either.

It's not always plain-sailing, though. Sometimes they go off the rails. :-)