Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I’d like 6th May 2026 I recently talked with Joseph Ruscio about AI coding tools for Heavybit’s High Leverage podcast: Ep. #9, The AI Coding Paradigm Shift with Simon Willison. Here are some of my highlights, including my disturbing realization that vibe coding and agentic engineering have started to converge in my own work. One thing I really enjoy about podcasts is that they sometimes push me to think out loud in a way that exposes an idea I’ve not previously been able to put into words. Vibe coding and agentic engineering are starting to overlap A few weeks after vibe coding was first coined I published Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks), where I firmly staked out my belief that “vibe coding” is a very different beast from responsible use of AI to write code, which I’ve since started to call agentic engineering. When Joseph brought up the distinction between the two I had a sudden realization that they’re not nearly as distinct for me as they used to be: Weirdly though, those things have started to blur for me already, which is quite upsetting. I thought we had a very clear delineation where vibe coding is the thing where you’re not looking at the code at all. You might not even know how to program. You might be a non-programmer who asks for a thing, and gets a thing, and if the thing works, then great! And if it doesn’t, you tell it that it doesn’t work and cross your fingers. But at no point are you really caring about the code quality or any of those additional constraints. And my take on vibe coding was that it’s fantastic, provided you understand when it can be used and when it can’t. A personal tool for you, where if there’s a bug it hurts only you, go ahead! If you’re building software for other people, vibe coding is grossly irresponsible because it’s other people’s information. Other people get hurt by your stupid bugs. You need to have a higher level than that. This contrasts with agentic engineering where you are a professional software engineer. You understand security and maintainability and operations and performance and so forth. You’re using these tools to the highest of your own ability. I’m finding the scope of challenges I can take on has gone up by a significant amount because I’ve got the support of these tools. But I’m still leaning on my 25 years of experience as a software engineer. The goal is to build high quality production systems: if you’re building lower quality stuff faster, I think that’s bad. I want to build higher quality stuff faster. I want everything I’m building to be better in every way than it was before. The problem is that as the coding agents get more reliable, I’m not reviewing every line of code that they write anymore, even for my production…