Vibe Coding and Agentic Engineering: Knowing Where to Stand

I've been writing software professionally for almost 30 years, and I'm more excited about building right now than I've been in a long time. A lot of engineers I talk to feel the opposite about AI, so I wanted to lay out how I actually use these tools day to day.

The short version is in the image above. Vibe coding and agentic engineering aren't rivals. They're two ends of one spectrum, and the real skill is being deliberate about where you operate for a given project. A throwaway script and a production system call for completely different modes, and most of the craft is in reading which one you're in.

The other thing I get into: you almost certainly don't need the elaborate fleets of parallel agents you see everywhere. I mostly work single-threaded, one feature at a time. Being intentional means actually looking at what the agent produces and steering it, and at that point more agents running at once works against you rather than for you.

I put the whole argument into a new video:

This is the approach I'm building my upcoming course around, and I'm now in the final stages of getting it ready to launch. The free Agentic Pipeline Blueprint is my framework for building real, production-grade systems with agentic tools, and downloading it puts you on the waitlist. When the course launches, I'll send the waitlist a 40% off coupon before it goes out to anyone else.

Grab the blueprint → gammavibe.com/blueprint