Agentic Coding for Non-Vibe Coders(theasymptotic.substack.com)
theasymptotic.substack.com
Agentic Coding for Non-Vibe Coders
https://theasymptotic.substack.com/p/agentic-coding-for-non-vibe-coders
4 comments
This is fantastic! Thanks for sharing. Great step forward towards a pragmatic approach to truly leveraging agentic coding to increase productivity and not slop. Love this.
My workflow for building side projects and work tools with AI coding agents that actually survive past the first month. Covers model choices (Claude Opus, Codex, Qwen), a docs-first approach (PITCH/ARCHITECTURE/IMPLEMENTATION), guardrails, context management via slash commands, and what I stopped using (MCP servers, multi-agent teams, instruction files). Includes dogfooding results — what shipped and what broke.
the docs-first approach is the part most people skip everyone wants to jump straight to prompting but without a PITCH.md or equivalent, the agent has no north star and you spend half your time correcting drift instead of building
the context save/restore slash commands are underrated too losing context mid-session and having to re-explain the whole codebase is where most of my time used to go.
What you're describing as "agentic for non-vibe coders" is essentially what responsible AI-assisted development looks like: maintaining human oversight, having clear architecture docs, keeping context alive across sessions. The vibe coding approach tends to skip all of this, which is why so many projects hit a wall after the initial sprint.
This is exactly the territory the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org) tries to address. It extends the original Agile Manifesto specifically for environments where AI agents are generating significant code. A few of its principles are directly relevant here: "Context is explicit and versioned" and "Architecture guides and constrains generation" — both of which describe what you're doing with your PITCH.md/ARCHITECTURE/IMPLEMENTATION approach.
Worth a read if you're thinking about how to formalize these practices across a team.