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**Ryan Donovan** (0:00)
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Hello, and welcome to The Stack Overflow Podcast, a place to talk all things software and technology. I'm your host, Ryan Donovan, and today we're talking about the difference between vibe coding and agentic engineering. And I'm here at the Snowflake Summit, recording live with my guest, Umesh Unnikrishnan, Head of Developer Experiences.

**Umesh Unnikrishnan** (0:42)
Hi there, I'm excited to be here. I'm Umesh Unnikrishnan, and I lead developer experiences here at Snowflake.

**Ryan Donovan** (0:48)
Before we get into the vibe coding versus agentic engineering, tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into software and technology?

**Umesh Unnikrishnan** (0:55)
So I've been writing code since I was eight or nine years old. Started on an old Atari 6502 computer back in the day. And I went to college in computer science, was writing a lot of code, mostly games and things like that back then. And my first job out of college was as an engineer at Microsoft, working on Microsoft Outlook. That was the start of my professional career as a software engineer.
And I spent some time at Microsoft as an engineer on products like Office, Outlook, Visual Studio and so on. And then decided that I wanted to do more on the product side of things. So I switched to a product role because at some point, I really wanted to learn more about how our software gets used and deployed. And there's more to engineering than just building the product. It's about how you take it to market.
And later on, I joined Google and spent about a decade there building consumer products, ad products. I led the Google Wallet team for a few years. I led a number of teams on the ad side, shopping ads and so on. And I had a couple of stints at smaller companies. I was at Pinterest helping build out their ads team back in the day.
And then led product at an ad tech startup as well. Became a venture, limited partner and a couple of funds. And I really enjoyed seeing around then, how AI was starting to really change the way people build software and how people use computers. And just looking back over the last couple of big inflection points that software has been on, whether it's that switch from PC to the internet, or desktop to mobile, or on-premise to cloud, it felt like we're really in the beginning of one of those other inflection points, right? And I decided then that I wanted to come back to the product and building side of things and join Snowflake a little over a year ago to help build out what eventually became CoCo.

**Ryan Donovan** (2:57)
Yeah. So you've got a pretty good broader overview of what the software production process looks like, which is good for a gentic side of things.

**Umesh Unnikrishnan** (3:06)
I think the revolution and the kind of changes that we are seeing in how software gets built is pretty fundamental to how things are going to evolve over the next few years and decades.
This is probably the biggest shift in how software gets built since, I don't know, the shift between some assembly language to high level languages or something like that. It's been pretty fundamental and I've had kind of the front seat to seeing some of that change as someone who leads teams at Snowflake, but also on the personal side, while I'm building my projects and also seeing how customers are building and deploying those projects.

**Ryan Donovan** (3:48)
Let's talk about the difference between vibe coding and agentic engineering. Obviously, when the first coding agents came out, everybody was just vibe coding. It was sort of a free for all, but it's become this very more professionalized thing and it seems like everybody is running agents. What is, in your mind, the difference between vibe coding and agentic engineering?

**Umesh Unnikrishnan** (4:09)
I think the way to think about it is there's been a rise and fall of vibe coding. I think Sridhar said that earlier this week.

**Ryan Donovan** (4:16)
I just started vibe coding.

**Umesh Unnikrishnan** (4:19)
And I enjoy vibe coding. It's actually made the process of building software fun again for a lot of people, especially if you're busy and you don't have time to learn all the different JavaScript frameworks and things like that. It becomes really interesting and accessible in many ways. And it's great for weekend projects. It's great for when you want to build something that solves a problem that you have, right? Like the number of personal tools and games for my kid and things like that that I've written with, I've coded over the last few months. It's been a lot of fun.