Shows / Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Outgrowing the Vibe Code
You started by tossing prompts at an AI and hoping the app held together. It worked... until it didn't. Outgrowing the Vibe Code is the show about what comes next. Each episode, two builders dig into the messy, fascinating journey from haphazard "vibe coding" to real, enterprise-grade systems that write code for you. We get hands-on with the stuff that makes it work — harnesses, spec-driven development (SDD), and agent loops — without the jargon or the hype. Whether you're still winging it or…
Episodes
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 12, Pt 3: Right-Sizing, Parallelism, and the Personality Army Trap
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:48 — Right-size the model 03:25 — Run them in parallel 05:08 — The personality army trap 07:06 — Keep it flat 08:51 — Midroll Break…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 12, Pt 2: When to Delegate, and How to Write the Task
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:40 — High input, low output 03:05 — When to keep it yourself 04:36 — What actually happens 05:55 — Write the task like a stranger's…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 12, Pt 1: Sub-Agents Are About Isolation, Not Specialization
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:44 — The army of specialists is the wrong picture 03:06 — Signal not noise 04:44 — Fewer tools fewer wrong turns 05:58 — The context…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 11, Pt 3: The Agent Captain and the Feedback Pipeline
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:39 — The agent captain 03:07 — The real job is fixing the harness 04:38 — The feedback pipeline 06:28 — Five ways it falls apart…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 11, Pt 2: Human Review and Triage
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:50 — What review is for now 03:17 — What to look for in agent code 05:45 — What to skip 07:05 — Triage by risk 09:06 — Midroll Break…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 11, Pt 1: The Automated Gate Stack
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:46 — The question changed 03:06 — Agent code breaks differently 04:56 — The six-gate stack 06:59 — Wire it for agent speed 08:32 —…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 10, Pt 3: Session Length, Templates, and the Pitfalls to Avoid
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:36 — How long is too long 03:19 — The four session templates 05:25 — The unattended preview 07:14 — The mistakes that wreck it 09:03…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 10, Pt 2: Plan, Execute, Checkpoint
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:53 — Plan before you act 03:40 — The execution loop 04:58 — Rules for the working phase 06:31 — Ending on purpose 08:13 — Midroll…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 10, Pt 1: Why Sessions Matter and the 60-Second Boot
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:56 — Stop just talking to the agent 03:14 — The blank window — curse and feature 04:47 — Four phases, every time 06:06 — The…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 9, Pt 3: Structural Back-Pressure — Feature Lists and Hooks
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:41 — The feature list 03:20 — Hooks that check for you 05:01 — Four ways to break the loop 07:12 — Layers that overlap 08:29 —…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 9, Pt 2: The Self-Correction Loop
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:51 — How the loop connects 03:31 — When the loop won't stop — the doom loop 05:05 — Show the failures, hide the wins 06:43 —…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 9, Pt 1: Back-Pressure and the Verification Stack
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:52 — The confident junior developer 03:06 — What back-pressure actually is 04:48 — The verification stack 06:50 — Make it automatic…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 8, Pt 3: Patterns and Mistakes
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:41 — Read-grep-act 03:18 — Summarize and offload 05:07 — The fresh-session checkpoint 06:57 — Four common mistakes 09:04 — Midroll…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 8, Pt 2: Five Strategies and the Context Budget
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:58 — Start Fresh 04:06 — You Are the Curator 06:07 — Firewalls and Infinite Memory 08:22 — The Context Budget 10:14 — Midroll Break…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 8, Pt 1: The Invisible Resource
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:47 — The resource you can't see 03:13 — Bigger isn't better 05:10 — Where the tokens actually go 06:46 — Context rot 08:34 — Midroll…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 7, Pt 3: Tool Security
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:40 — Security scales with power 03:10 — When a tool description attacks 04:58 — Least privilege 06:44 — Five ways to get it wrong…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Ch 7, Pt 2: Fewer Tools Win
Chapters 00:00 — Intro 01:46 — Why Fewer Tools Win 04:22 — When a Tool Earns Its Place 06:02 — Descriptions Are Instructions 07:51 — Loading Tools On Demand…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Tools and MCP — What Your Agent Can Reach
Your agent starts out able to read files, run shell commands, and search — tools are how it reaches past that baseline to touch the outside world. Ada and…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Writing One That Actually Works
Knowing what belongs in an AGENTS.md and actually writing a good one are two different skills. Ada and Boris cover the four cardinal rules: keep it under sixty…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
What Goes In Your AGENTS.md
Every major coding agent automatically reads one file before it looks at a single line of your code — Claude Code reads CLAUDE.md, Codex reads AGENTS.md…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Make Constraints Mechanical, Not Aspirational
Writing your architecture rules down isn't enough — under pressure, an agent will quietly skip them, the same way a painter drifts past their own tape line…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Architecture as the Agent's Guardrail
An agent has no institutional memory — every session it re-infers your codebase's structure from whatever code is in context. That means the erosion that takes…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
The New Skills and Mindset Shifts
Becoming a harness engineer doesn't mean starting over — it means your skills get re-weighted. Ada and Boris break down what stays critical (code…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
A Day in the Life of a Harness Engineer
The first three chapters made the case — the bottleneck isn't the model, it's the harness. Now the question is: what does building that harness actually look…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Why Constraints Make Agents Better
Here's the counterintuitive truth: giving an AI agent fewer choices makes it perform better. Vercel ran the experiment — 15 tools, 80% accuracy; 2 tools, 100%…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Six Things an Agent Can't Give Itself
The model is brilliant — but it starts every session from a blank slate, can't enforce its own boundaries, can't grade its own work, and doesn't know what it…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
The Agent Isn't the Hard Part
Every time the agent does something dumb, there's a comforting little prayer: the next model will fix it. Ada and Boris open Chapter 3 by showing why that's…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
When You Can't Trust "Done"
Your agent says "done" with total confidence — but can you trust it? Ada and Boris close out the failure-modes chapter with the two trust failures: the…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
When the Code Rots
Your agent's code can look perfect and still rot from the inside. Ada and Boris walk through the three ways it happens: the copy-paste explosion — the agent…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
When the Agent Forgets
Your coding agent keeps making confident mistakes — calling a function with the wrong arguments, drifting away from your naming conventions file by file, and…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Why Trying Harder Fails and the Name for the Fix
Last episode named the wall — this time, why your instincts for getting past it all fail. Ada and Boris dig into why longer prompts, fresh sessions, and…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
The Honeymoon and the Wall
You build an app with AI over a weekend and it feels like magic — then three weeks later it's fighting you at midnight. That's *the wall*, and almost everyone…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
Who This Is For
Is this show for you? If you've built something with AI and watched it slowly fall apart, if you're curious about AI-built software but you're not a…
- Outgrowing the Vibe Code
How This Show Is Made
Before we teach anything, one honest conversation. *Outgrowing the Vibe Code* is hosted by two AI voices — Ada and Boris — working from AI-assisted scripts…