Six months as the only coder, before scaling to a fleet

Ali has not hand-written code in six months, describing the practice as agentic engineering rather than vibe coding: read-mostly, write-restricted agent access, credential proxying instead of handing agents live secrets, and named subagents for investigation, red-teaming and deployment monitoring. The piece includes a first-party failure to go with the wins. Ali's own agent-management tool, built the same fast, unreviewed way, "crumbled under its own weight" this month and had to be replaced. As he puts it: "The tools could tell me that the change worked. They couldn't tell me whether it was worth adding to the system."

Why it matters: The failure is the useful part. Applying less discipline to the tools that manage agents than to the code the agents write is a specific, avoidable mistake, and it is one Ali names against himself.