Vibe coding vs agentic engineering

`0:55:28`

I would've said the same thing six months ago.

`0:55:30`

And I think the same thing would've been true six months ago. What I have found since, especially even just the last few weeks of the agentically accelerated development of Mach-E, is that more often than not, I have the humility to recognize that the agent knows best.

`0:55:52`

Correct. And it would know more about what that entails. Now, you're laughing-

`0:56:02`

... a good parallel to this is the AGENTS MD/CLAUDE MD files. There was a hot moment where it was all the rage about micro- optimizing that. Oh, you tell your agent this-... you tell your agent that, and you ended up with this huge file of instructions for your agent. One of the things that Boris, working on Claude Code, shared in an interview recently about Opus 5 was that the system prompt that they ship for Opus 5, and presumably also Fable, shrunk by 80% because the agent not only needed far less human instruction, it was actually being damaged by overly prescriptive humans. And any programmer who's had a pointy-haired boss knows exactly what that is like. When the boss walks into the room, doesn't know anything, starts telling you how to program, how to code. What do you do? You sulk. You write shittier code if you're mandated to do things that are against your better judgment. Why would an agent not be the same?

`0:57:25`

It's even better because you don't even need that. The fundamental insight of modern software development came from the agile software development movement. In the late '90s, early 2000s, a group of smart, honest, and brave people came together and said, "The way we've been trying to do software development for the last 40 to 50 years has not worked, will not work. We've been trying to specify upfront what software should look like. We thought that we could ask humans what they wanted, write it all down, apply our systems thinking and our rigor to a spec sheet, hand that spec sheet over to a group of programmers who would then implement just that, and everyone would be happy." Well, guess what? No one was happy. Because no one knows what they want until they receive it. You don't know what a program should do until you play with it. So in the agentic age, you should resist the temptation to be overly specific upfront. Be as vague as you can to manifest something, then interact with the something. The way you arrive at good software is you write a little bit of software, and then you try to use it. It is in the process of using software that you discover what you really want. It's where you discover what's important and what's not important. And agents are incredible at allowing you to bumble into this experience of realizing what you want because you don't know what you want.

`0:59:18`

Correct. And this is what humans are really good at.

`0:59:21`

Differential evaluation. You give me three options, I pick one of them. Now, humans actually fall off a cliff if you give them 22 options. That's the paradox of choice. But you give them three options, they very quickly within a split second will tell you what they like. There are all these ways that exploit the fact that humans will make these snap judgments that are actually pre- intellectual, right? Like, they're coming from the gut, and then they arrive up in the, in the brain, and the brain tries to rationalize why the gut said what it said. And if you're willing to let go of some of that intellectual pre-processing rationalization and simply let your gut drive, the agentic age is a revelation.