Why the Fastest Engineers Are Falling Behind

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**Kitze** (1:00)
It's not my coding versus their coding, it's my coding versus their setups. I'm fast, but I'm not faster than engineering with LLMs.

**Patrick Akil** (1:07)
This is Kitze, a solo builder who juggles 140 projects. And we discuss how the best engineers are moving faster with agent setups.

**Kitze** (1:16)
Every time I get frustrated, just add that to a police file.

**Patrick Akil** (1:19)
One day, there were like 300 changes in like 200 repositories. How do you do that in the first place? We are becoming the bottleneck.

**Kitze** (1:25)
We are, either you're a fucking rock star, or you're gone. Run, be a plumber, be an electrician, be someone who's gonna be 10 times more paid than us.

**Patrick Akil** (1:33)
On a serious note, my number one advice would be, Asary talks on, we're going from Vibe Coding to Vibe Engineering. What does Vibe Engineering mean to you?

**Kitze** (1:45)
Just someone with a lot of technical knowledge who then drives the agents. I hate how we're throwing an umbrella term that everything Vibe Coded is bad, and the verb Vibe Coding is so vague and so wide, that people just throw it at everything.

**Patrick Akil** (2:01)
It's a meme now.

**Kitze** (2:02)
It's a meme at this point. And I hate how much we kind of forgot that most people sucked at design and coding. So when you see most personal websites before LLMs were just horrible and trash, and most apps looked like bootstrap or tail-windy or like Shadzian-ish, and now we are on this high horse just judging LLMs, oh, that's not... It looks the same. Oh, a gradient. You didn't even know how to write a gradient three years ago. And they're like, ew, that has too many colors and whatever. So I don't like the term. I like to differentiate them because people with a lot of engineering experience, when they drive agents, you get like 20 times better results because they already know where do they want to go. It would just be slower if they do it file by file, line by line, and now they can just take a shortcut. And Vibe Coders are just like throwing shit at the wall until it sticks, hoping that the thing is going to work.
So that's the main difference.

**Patrick Akil** (2:55)
Vibe Coding for me, I love that everyone can now be a builder, and that's what you do with Vibe Coding. But the whole Vibe engineering part, you mentioning engineers being better at that, that doesn't always add up for me. Some people still have challenges actually having the agents do what they want to do or feeling like a babysitter.
What is something that works really well for you that others can do as well?

**Kitze** (3:16)
It took me 15 minutes with Fable 5 yesterday to start yelling at it. First 15 minutes, I was like, oh my God, this is super intelligent. It's so much smarter than all of you. And then I start with the swearing.
You can feel that it's different than the other ones. You can feel something new, but you can still smell the LLM underneath. So I think the least frustrations that I've ever had with a model was in the Codex app with GPT 5.5, is the most smooth, stable agent to work with. It feels like a very mature, like Gil Foyle from Silicon Valley. If you've seen the show, it feels like he's stable and mature. He's going to stop you from doing stupid shit. When you want to do something, it can actually say, no, we're not going to do that. And I feel like we had the best, if I measured the amount of times that I press caps lock, it's probably the least amount of times. Anytime I try to take a shortcut, like, oh, let me be faster with Composer 2.5 or whatever, it always inevitably ended up with like, what the fuck did you do? That was not smart and blah, blah, blah. So I still think it depends on the skills that you have, the skills that you have as a human, the knowledge that you have as a human, combined with how much of that knowledge is written as skills, rules, memories, and other stuff that the agent actively reads from.