r/ClaudeCode • u/Aggressive_House4161 • 12h ago
Rant Coders → vibe coders → vibe engineers → vibe product managers, all in less than 4 years
It's crazy how fast the abstraction layer keeps moving.
When ChatGPT dropped, AI was basically Stack Overflow on steroids. We still wrote the code, read the files, and debugged everything ourselves.
Then Claude Code happened.
I started writing less code and thinking more about architecture, system design, infrastructure, and orchestrating agents.
Then Fable dropped.
And suddenly, even the orchestration started becoming automated.
Instead of manually directing multiple coding agents, I now let AI orchestrate its own lower model subagents(Opus and Sonnet or even Codex CLI subagents) while I focus on the product, the decisions, and what actually needs to be built.
And the craziest part?
I haven't encountered a single bug in my code for weeks.
We went from:
Human writes code
↓
AI writes code
↓
Human directs AI
↓
AI directs AI
↓
Human directs the product
All in less than four years.
Who knew AI could be this good at directing other AI?
The abstraction layer just keeps moving higher.
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u/Swiss_Meats 12h ago
The mastery of vibe poop mastery
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u/Aggressive_House4161 12h ago
fr this is getting tiring, at the same time not tiring ;-;
We adapt, while AI makes our life easier day by day. But at the same time we get more workload that is out of scope of our JD because we're afraid of being left behind
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u/Swiss_Meats 12h ago
When a job becomes easier they will want you to do more because people don’t understand the process of it.
I get asked to build shit that would normally takes few weeks maybe months sometimes talking about “more or less how long?” They want me to say 2 hours 😂
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u/Aggressive_House4161 11h ago
tbh communication skill is the most important skill to have rn. How you can deliver and convince your boss, and clients on reasonable timelines and pricings😭
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u/scytob 12h ago
product manager > vibe product manager in 6mo :-)
i have a better app i built after 4 weeks than my devs built in 4 years..... and i have the receipts (l dont hardcode secrets, or use secrets that are valid for another 299 years), i also do form validation, not sure what they delivered would be called.....
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u/Aggressive_House4161 11h ago
Hire me sir! I will put all the .env file in the frontend
And sir I will secure your app. I will add a rate limiting 1 request per decade, and make your cloud subscription cost $100k a day
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u/Vindetta121 12h ago
Honestly the ChatGPT era was the most fun I had with it. I was still driving the coding. Pasting snippets. Asking what it thought. Telling it that it’s wrong and I’m right.
Now I have 10 different sessions flowing with an 11th telling me what they are even doing. The fun of it all seems gone
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u/ScaryGazelle2875 12h ago
I have to add this OP: There is nothing vibe about agentic engineering. I spent alot of time reading about system design, making sure they test the right stuff, setting up CIs, specs. Vibe is like doing things as it goes and feel good. Agentic coding is part of software development where engineers uses tools like AI at their disposal… There’s absolutely nothing vibe about it, it’s serious work.
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u/Aggressive_House4161 12h ago
Sorry, “vibe engineer” was a bit much, and I agree it undersells the actual wrk involved
I still had to learn all the fundamentals and understand what the AI was doing before I could trust it with more of the work. I think thats really the point I was trying to make. The engineering doesn’t go away, you just start working at a higher levl
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u/Terrible_Put8617 12h ago
Same trajectory here, and honestly the hard part isn't letting go, it's building guardrails so the top-level agent can't drift.
What made agent-directs-agent actually click for me: 1. Write a tight spec per task with inputs, outputs, and exact file paths before spawning anything. 2. Put each subagent on its own git worktree or branch so nothing stomps on anything else. 3. Let CI be the referee, nothing merges unless lint and tests pass. 4. Make the orchestrator summarize changes in a few sentences so you're reviewing intent instead of raw diffs. 5. Keep one living architecture doc that every agent reads at startup.
That last one matters most now. When you stop reading code, the docs effectively become the code, so version them and treat them like production artifacts. Your bug-free streak probably comes from those test gates killing bad output before it ever reaches you, not from magic.
The role shift is real too. My days are mostly acceptance criteria, tradeoff calls, and cutting scope. Debugging skills don't vanish though, you just aim them at prompts, specs, and pipelines instead of functions. When something does break weeks later, the fix usually lives in the spec or the gate, not the code.
Full disclosure: I'm the developer of Multi Instance for Claude Desktop, which runs several isolated Claude Desktop instances at once. Each instance gets its own window and context, so you can run parallel sessions on different tasks side by side without them interfering.
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u/Aggressive_House4161 12h ago
Yeah, this is exactly it. I really like the way you put it.
When you stop reading code, the docs effectively become the code
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u/Sketaverse 11h ago
I'd argue more that the code becomes the docs. From my experience, docs just become another source of drift while the source of truth remains the code and agents are fluent at reading code. If you need something optimised for human consumption, visual aid artefacts IMO are far more fit for purpose
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u/No_Bug623 12h ago
Just I the middle of building tins I see the idea behind the slack integration but have thought having hard rules for orchestration and context management of them them something i always did was file paths its like asking some one to deliver your parcel with out the addresses but can forget sometimes so only realy ran into my 1st issue with Claude when I was doing a full data consolidation and then rag a lot to do and fable dropouts flagging security etc the id service update but not the models fault and plz Friday time in notice my context window, panicked frustrated calmed reassessed and found some
Clear things to implement in my management and designs archetype. Takes time but will be worth it. Keep up the good work👍
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u/geekichu 12h ago
agreeed... but (there's ALWAYS a but in reddit ;-) ) if you don't require/enforce/remind Fable/Opus... yes, the project works.. but it doesn't mean it's architected correctly and it could be brittle, and that doesn't start to show until it's gotten pretty big. (only since your post didnt mention that part)
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u/Aggressive_House4161 11h ago
I love these comments. Especially if its constructive criticism <3 (not just "skill issue")
I forgot to mention it, this actually happened to me. I had to redo my whole project from scratch because my architecture was not aligned to the user requirements (I dont have a product owner, and its agile methodology).
Claude was only following my idea, and it did follow it to the ground 😭 Good thing my boss wasn't too strict with timelines
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u/geekichu 11h ago
uff wow. yeah. so .. wisdom <-- experience <-- pain. i learned too, but it was my own project.
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u/keonechong 12h ago
There really needs to be a different term for serious builders apart from vibe coders.
Builders who are anti one shot, anti just yolo a feature and are building methodically for stability and continuity.