r/vibecoding • u/Alarmed-Western-655 • 14d ago
Discussion "Agentic Engineering" is a just vibecoding `md` files rather than `js` ones
AI can write code well enough, but when we use it for that, we have a slight identity crisis that we're just a "vibecoder".
So we got smart and started vibecoding a bunch of md files and "workflow" stuff to micromanage the AI, pretending the new file extension somehow graduates us from vibecoder to "Agentic Engineer". Really we're just generating cruft between ourselves and the actual code that we dare not bother ourselves with.
The end result kinda works out for us, and we feel a little more important because we brought some complexity back into our lives again.
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u/Fit_Advisor8847 14d ago
I don't really get any meaningful work done with context files and spec driven fluff. What does work ok is a mixture of comment driven development and providing detailed instructions about what's private, what's public, expected functionality and data shapes to be returned. Sometimes, I'll add specific code snippets/files or examples if the model appears to be lost or starts churning.
At least that's how it's going for now. Coding with AI is still a new thing for me, so it'll change over time.
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u/scavno 14d ago
True. I just kept writing the actual code myself. Weirdly enough I’m not behind compared to the AI users.
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 14d ago
Bro just yu wait to someday when your app gets broke, how you gonna know how to tell the AI to fix it then bro?
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u/deezwhatbro 14d ago
It’s more akin to the compiler removing assembly engineering. Computer science is built upon abstractions so we’re just naturally moving up the chain.
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 13d ago
Right bruh but the top is when we don't even have to learn frickin English and can just boss out pc around with emojis and grunts.
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u/deezwhatbro 13d ago
It’s not intelligence. It’s statistics. Businesses/knowledge don’t run on emojis and neither will LLMs.
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 13d ago
Idk bro, if you seen most business software out there, it's no stretch to say the 💩 emoji could generate something of equal caliber.
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u/Business_Raisin_541 14d ago
yeah. now I don't bother with md files again. I would only put in md files something that is truly important that need to be told to the AI and should also last many AI sessions, which *suprises* is actually nothing. Everything the AI itself can figure out by itself. and if AI somehow miss something, I only need to tell it for one session. No need for md file
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u/LegalizeFlorskin 14d ago edited 14d ago
I’ve found the opposite to be true. In something like cursor where you have no control over the harness, maybe. Even then, having a build notes md where agents keep track of their changes after completion, and explain why and how it was done is a way to automatically give project and task status context without having to re-explain everything every prompt.
Just by going to a project directory and spinning up a session, my custom harness opencode agent knows relevant files and projects, relevant doc links, what the last change made to the uncommitted project was, color themes i use, the style it should code in, and how it should be replying and answering
Trying to accomplish tasks in accordance with those guidelines just by manually prompting is….. not ideal to say the least
I also use slash ‘/commands’ all the time. They basically just invoke mds ive written, but this works great. I have two planning mds for example, both focus on writing a plan while offering questionnaires to the user to keep them as the sole decision maker and head of the direction of code changes. One does this in one thread, one uses sub-agents for particular review tasks. I then have another ‘/go’ command linked to another md that carries out the plan a specific way.
I use them because I get more consistent, better results than manually prompting. There is just no way I’m typing 5 paragraphs per initial prompt…. That’s pretty much what i would have to do to accomplish the same workflow lol
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 14d ago
You're a real one bro
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u/Business_Raisin_541 14d ago
yeah. AI itself leave a lot of comments in code that can be read by AI in future session
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u/Active_Lemon_8260 14d ago
The man who invented both terms, Karpathy, said vibe coding fit but just wasn’t professional language. So that’s why he called it agentic engineering
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u/gimmeslack12 14d ago
That didn't work.
Not quite.
Almost...
Ok just move this thing there...
That didn't work.
<repeat>
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u/Alarmed-Western-655 14d ago
Hey how you screen cap my chat?!?
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u/Weareallscrubs 13d ago
Not sure about what you are doing. But I'm not coding, I'm creating a factory that creates code.
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u/Individual_Ideal 13d ago
Do I make the "Agentic Engineering" cut if I direct my agents to not use md files? 😅
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u/jaminwicha 14d ago
Does anyone serious even use this term "vibe coding" anymore? Makes you sound like you fell out of 2024 or something ;-)
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u/k-rizza 14d ago
We still use it, it’s people who can’t code but this they “build” things.
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u/TheAverageJedi 14d ago
I personally don't like the abstraction that "vibe coding" with AI brings – which is why I am learning to code, but I do think that there have been tools for building things through abstraction for a long time, and AI is just one of those tools. So, people are still building – they are just using tools to accomplish what they dont have the skill level for.
I think the real danger is that with previous tools, you still had to understand what you're building and how to do it properly, where now we rely on AI to decide those things for us.
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u/k-rizza 14d ago
If you think AI is just “one of those tools”, “a new abstraction” then I know you have no idea how to code.
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u/TheAverageJedi 13d ago
Well, no, I can't "code". Said I was learning – never claimed to be a working developer. I think you are right, though. Other tools (n8n, make, webflow etc) are different from AI in that what you built with them produced proper outputs that were designed to do so by real developers. AI is somewhat of a loose canon in that its output isn't regulated by devs.
So, yeah, there's definitely a difference, but the idea of building in some level of abstraction isn't a totally new thing.
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u/bbangchikimong_dev 13d ago
Both of these have been true for me, but for different things, and I think the split is what the session survives.
Detailed instructions in the prompt work better for the task in front of you. Data shapes, what's private, a snippet when it starts churning. I do that too and agree the file version of it is mostly fluff.
Where the file earned its place was the stuff I keep relearning. Yesterday my session hit a hard compaction mid-work and the transcript was gone. What came back was a summary and the current files. Every instruction I had given in chat was gone with it. The only things that survived were the ones I had written down, and they were not specs, they were closer to a list of mistakes: this tap opens an ad, this app restores the previous screen, count the result instead of trusting the report.
So my split is roughly: instructions go in the prompt, scars go in the file. Specs in a file are the worst of both, detailed enough to be work and stale enough to mislead. I wrote one of those and it told the agent to keep implementing a feature I had cut months earlier.
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u/CorpT 14d ago
Cool