TL; DR: Vibe Coding — Food for Agile Thought #484
Welcome to the 484th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 42,673 peers. This week, Ethan Mollick examines vibe coding, where AI-native teams blend human expertise and AI to iterate and collaborate rapidly. Maarten Dalmijn critiques rigid planning, advocating for elastic teams that thrive in complexity. In anticipating engineering’s shift toward AI management roles, Jasper Gilley quit his FAANG job, seeing automation redefine technical careers. Michael Küsters likens middle management to Rock-Paper-Scissors, where unpredictability is key to success. At the same time, Fred Hebert dissects AI integration, emphasizing thoughtful human-in-the-loop design to avoid automation pitfalls. Also, Zvi Mowshowitz unpacks the Manus hype, revealing it as a cleverly marketed Claude wrapper, demonstrating how LLMs and AI hype cycles shape perceptions of capability.
Next, Itamar Gilad argues that product success is rare due to underestimated complexity and misaligned forces, advocating for strategic clarity and intentional culture-building. Then, David Pereira highlights how pilot testing helps PMs validate assumptions, reduce risks, and iterate faster, and Brian Balfour predicts AI will redefine product teams—transforming methodologies, roles, monetization, and distribution—urging AI-native strategies. In an interview with Peter Yang, Anthropic’s Scott White details how Claude 3.7 Sonnet accelerates product development through AI-generated PRDs, evals, and agentic coding tools.
Lastly, we critique overly blameless post-mortems, advocating for balanced accountability to prevent mediocrity, and Johanna Rothman champions rolling-wave planning to reduce pressure and improve adaptability. Ash Maurya stresses that successful pivots require rapid business model testing and external accountability. Additionally, Zvi Mowshowitz dissects Manus, a Chinese AI agent hyped as groundbreaking but revealed as a Claude wrapper, and, finally, Andrew Chen explores “vibe coding,” where AI reshapes software creation, predicting a shift toward intuitive, GUI-driven design, fragmented UX, and adaptive, self-improving applications.
🛑 Becoming obsolete is a choice, not inevitable!
👉 Don’t Miss Out — Join the Second Cohort: AI for Agile Practitioners: Pilot Cohort #2, May 14 to June 11, 2025, at € 199!
<!–
This week, the most popular discussion on LinkedIn was: Scrum Masters, are you working too much?
–>
Did you miss the previous Food for Agile Thought issue 483?
🗞 Shall I notify you about articles like this one? Awesome! You can sign up here for the ‘Food for Agile Thought’ newsletter and join 42,000-plus subscribers.
🎓 Join Stefan in one of his upcoming Professional Scrum training classes!
🏆 The Tip of the Week
: Speaking Things Into Existence
Ethan Mollick explores “vibe coding,” demonstrating how AI-native product teams blend human expertise and AI to rapidly prototype, creatively iterate, and dynamically collaborate—reshaping product development in a vibe-filled work environment.
What seems consistent is that, for now, the greatest value comes not from surrendering control entirely to AI or clinging to entirely human workflows, but from finding the right points of collaboration for each specific task—a skill we’re all still learning.
🧠 Artificial Intelligence
(via Honeycomb): AI: Where in the Loop Should Humans Go?
Fred Hebert explores the critical question of where humans fit in AI-driven systems, emphasizing thoughtful integration to avoid automation pitfalls and maintain essential human expertise and situational awareness.
: The Manus Marketing Madness
Zvi Mowshowitz analyzes Manus, a hyped Chinese AI agent revealed as a cleverly marketed Claude wrapper, highlighting influencer-driven hype and how LLMs plus basic “vibe coding” can quickly simulate advanced capabilities.
: Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions
Andrew Chen describes “vibe coding,” an AI-driven coding approach emphasizing intuition over traditional coding, predicting shifts toward youth-created software, GUI-based design, fragmented UX, adaptive self-improving apps, and evolving dev team roles.
➿ Agile & Leadership
: Why Most Organizations Produce Brittle Teams Instead of Elastic Teams
Maarten Dalmijn explains that organizations unintentionally create brittle teams by obsessing over predictability and excessive planning, sacrificing adaptability; instead, fostering elastic teams that embrace complexity, flexibility, and short feedback loops produces better results.
: Predictability in middle management? Good luck!
Middle management, as Michael Küsters explains, is a balancing act between stability, performance, and disruption. Success lies in unpredictability—dynamically shifting strategies, avoiding rigid cycles, and staying ahead of inevitable shifts.
: I quit my FAANG job because it’ll be automated by the end of 2025
Jasper Gilley quit his FAANG job, anticipating automation will rapidly reduce engineering roles to “AI context managers” or “infrastructure janitors,” reshaping careers around human skills rather than traditional technical expertise.
🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — March 26-27, 2025
Discover Scrum’s four success principles in this official Scrum.org Advanced Scrum Master training class, which includes the industry-recognized PSM II certification. The PSM II training class is designed as a live virtual class and will be in English.
Enjoy the benefits of a live virtual immersive class with like-minded agile peers from 09:00 – 17:30 CET.
Learn more: 🖥 🇬🇧 Advanced Professional Scrum Master Training w/ PSM II Certificate — March 26-27, 2025.
Customer Voice: “Dear Stefan, Thanks a lot for two intense and mindblowing days. Your way of teaching suites me perfectly. I must admit that all the positive feedback you have gotten is spot on! I would any time a day recommand your class to a Scrum Master who wants to add a whole new level to his/her scrum game. To all of you reading this. You have to experience Stefans class to understand how good it is.” (Source.)
<!–
👉 From time to time, we can offer last-minute seats for training classes at cost to individuals who do not have access to a corporate training budget. If you would like to be notified about these opportunities, please register here.
–>
🎯 Product
: How Pilot Projects Can Give PMs the Support They Lack from Leadership
David Pereira highlights that pilot testing can bridge the gap between PMs and leadership by quickly converting assumptions into evidence, reducing product risks, enabling faster iteration, and effectively identifying valuable and distracting features.
: Why Is Product So Hard?
Itamar Gilad argues product success is rare because organizations underestimate complexity, fail to align conflicting forces, and neglect culture—emphasizing embracing uncertainty, strategic clarity, and treating organizational culture intentionally as a product.
: 🎙 Inside the Best AI Model for Coding and Writing | Scott White (Anthropic)
In Peter Yang’s interview, Anthropic’s Scott White explains using Claude 3.7 Sonnet for efficient, iterative product building through AI-generated PRDs, precise evals, rapid prototyping, cross-team collaboration, and agentic coding tools.
(via Reforge): AI Native Product Teams: How They Will Think, Work, and Build Differently
Brian Balfour argues that AI will fundamentally redefine product teams, transforming methodologies, roles, tools, monetization, and distribution, urging teams to embrace AI-native strategies and rethink their entire product approach.
📯 The Alignment-to-Value Pipeline: Building Products That Matter
Effective product development requires both strategic alignment and healthy Product Backlog management. Misalignment leads to backlog bloat, trust erosion, and building the wrong products. By implementing proper alignment tools, separating discovery from delivery, and maintaining appropriate backlog size (3-6 sprints), teams can build products that truly matter. Success depends on trust, collaboration, risk navigation, and focusing on outcomes over outputs. Learn more about how to embrace the alignment-to-value pipeline and create your product operating model.
Learn more: The Alignment-to-Value Pipeline: Building Products That Matter.
🛠 Concepts, Tools & Measuring
: Blameful Post-Mortems
The author argues that overly blameless software post-mortems harm accountability, emphasizing the need for balanced “blameful” practices that clearly assign fault, encourage ownership, and fairly hold teams accountable to prevent sustained mediocrity.
: How to Reduce Planning, Deliver More, and Surprisingly, Reduce Pressure
Johanna Rothman recommends reducing planning by adopting rolling-wave approaches that limit detailed planning to short, manageable periods, enabling teams to deliver faster, adapt to reality, build trust, and significantly lower pressure.
: The Art of the Pivot
Ash Maurya emphasizes successful pivots require quickly stress-testing business models, avoiding random experimentation, maintaining external accountability, and separating founder success from individual idea success to accelerate product building effectively.
<!–
🎶 Encore
–>
📅 Scrum Training & Event Schedule
You can secure your seat for Scrum training classes, workshops, and meetups directly by following the corresponding link in the table below:
See all upcoming classes here.
You can book your seat for the training directly by following the corresponding links to the ticket shop. If the procurement process of your organization requires a different purchasing process, please contact Berlin Product People GmbH directly.
📺 Join 6,000-plus Agile Peers on Youtube
Now available on the Age-of-Product Youtube channel to improve learning, for example, about vibe coding:
- Jurgen Appelo: Humans Robots Agents — Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Peter Merel: the agile way — Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Dr Lynn Kelley: Change Questions: The Keys to Implementing Organizational Change—Hands-on Agile 2025.
- Hands-on Agile 66: Escape the Feature Frenzy, Build to Sell with Sandrine Olivencia.
- Hands-on Agile 62: From Backlog Manager to Product Manager with David Pereira.
- Hands-on Agile 61: Toyota Kata Coaching for Agile Teams & Transformations with Fortune Buchholtz.
- Hands-on Agile EXTRA: How Elon Musk Would Run YOUR Business with Joe Justice.
✋ Do Not Miss Out — Learn more about Vibe Coding — Join the 20,000-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community
I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.
If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.
Help your team to learn about Leadership Blindspots by pointing them to the free Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide:
🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
The post Food for Agile Thought #484: Vibe Coding, Product’s Hard Nature, Brittle Product Teams, Pivots & Post-Mortems appeared first on Age-of-Product.com.
