Summary

In the third installment of his 'How to use AI with DE' interview series, Simon Späti talks with Wes McKinney about how he actually works with coding agents. The central distinction is that what Wes practices is 'agentic engineering'—rigorous spec-driven, reviewed, and tested work—not 'vibe coding,' which he calls dangerous and irresponsible. Wes invests heavily in the specification phase, uses the superpowers framework to prevent agent drift, and auto-reviews every commit with his own tool Roborev, leaving him with far less but higher-quality code to review himself. Because code is now cheap to create but expensive to maintain, he argues that saying no and exercising taste is the engineer's last line of defense against AI-generated bloat. He believes paying the true cost of tokens will eventually curb wasteful, low-value work, and that the future lies in knowledge systems, semantic layers, and headless BI rather than traditional data engineering. The lingering open question is how the next generation of senior engineers will develop expertise when the hard, hands-on coding labor—where people normally learn—is being automated away.

Key Insight

In an era where code is essentially free to generate, the engineer's value shifts from writing code to exercising taste, judgment, and disciplined process—deciding what to build and rigorously reviewing what agents produce, which is what separates responsible agentic engineering from dangerous vibe coding.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  Vibe coding is very dangerous and irresponsible.

• 5

  We can't disengage from planning and writing specs. We can move much faster, but don't vibe code.

• 8

  When code is free, saying no is our last defense.

• 6

  Every new feature is cheap to create but expensive to maintain. Each one adds surface areas for bugs, confusion, and future agent mistakes.

• 7

  Because if you don't, AI will bring in lots of crap.

• 4

  Automated code review certainly helps, but it isn't a substitute for engineering experience.

• 5

  Every prompt, every decision in the spec phase adds up to 100s or 1000s of small decisions, essentially manifesting one's taste.

• 3

  Bugs are created faster these days, but also fixed faster.

Tone

opinionated, technical, forward-looking