The New SDLC: A Senior Dev's Honest Take on Vibe Coding and Agentic Engineering (opens in new tab)

TL;DR Vibe coding is not a development methodology. It is an attitude toward verification: optional. That attitude does not scale past prototypes. Agentic engineering puts AI inside a scaffold of constraints, tests, and feedback loops. The developer's primary output becomes the system that produces code, not the code itself. The key formula from the Google whitepaper: Agent = Model + Scaffold. Most teams invest heavily in the model and ignore the scaffold. That is backwards. Context engineeri...