Andy Grove protocol: First let chaos reign, then rein in the chaos

My AI use protocol: First let vibes reign, then rain on the vibes

I almost think the agent hates me when I periodically pull it back and have it clean up the developing mess a bit before it proceeds. Contra many horror stories, I think coding agents can do effective architecture, refactoring, technical debt management, elegentification, etc. But they won’t do so unprompted. Their natural mode is to create an ever growing big-ball-of-mud architecture unless you ask. And knowing when and what to ask for based on subtle signs of growing muddiness in particular areas is emerging as the core PM skill for me. And if you don’t ask in time, the muddiness may become unrecoverable and you have to start clean. And this happens 100x faster than with human devs.

Because the agent can and will keep barreling forward-only creating ever harder problems for itself and ever more baroque solutions until it grinds to a halt with bugs that stall it completely. 100% feature dev, 0% refactoring. If it were an experienced human dev they would mutiny against the project manager, but an AI can’t hurt so never feels the aesthetic-cognitive pain needed to mutiny. Human dev pain is a managerial affordance in effective software engineering project management. Bad PMs only allow breathing room for refactoring under threat of mutiny. Good ones build it in, but not so much that devs never complain. In a good software team, the devs have to be constantly grumbling at least a little about how PMs aren’t allowing time to refactor. Back in the day I was a mediocre PM. I never had a full mutiny on my hands, but I was faced with a mulish no more than once.

I suspect many people who are ending up with unsalvageable big balls of vibecoded mud on their hands have never managed human dev teams or experienced a technical debt driven mutiny.

That said, people pearl-clutching about the growing horrors of unseen big balls of mud perhaps overrate legibility to humans. I think AI can produce sustainably muddy but still robust and efficient code that would horrify auteur human devs.