Tools: Agentic Coding: How To Move Beyond Vibe Coding Without Shipping A Mess
Vibe coding was fun because it made software feel weightless. You could paste a prompt, get a working feature, and demo it before dinner. But once real users show up, that same workflow starts leaking. The code compiles, the demo works, and then everything around it breaks: retries, auth, state, costs, and the long tail of edge cases.
Agentic coding is the shift from “generate code” to “run a controlled system that generates, executes, and corrects code and actions”. You spend less time typing functions and more time defining goals, constraints, tool permissions, and checks that keep your AI from drifting. It is still fast. It is just fast on purpose.
If you are a solo builder shipping an AI powered app, this matters because the first production incident usually is not a model problem. It is a “backend reality” problem: missing persistence, no job control, no rate limits, no audit trail, and no safe way to let an agent touch user data.
Vibe coding works best when the cost of being wrong is low. Think weekend prototypes, internal demos, or one-off scripts. The moment you attach the prototype to a real product, you inherit a different class of requirements that AI code generation does not automatically solve.
When usage goes from a handful of test accounts to hundreds of concurrent users, the same “just call the model” flow turns into a traffic and cost problem. One user action becomes three model calls, two retries, a file upload, a webhook, and a database write. Without hard limits and backpressure, you get unpredictable bills and cascading failures.
When an agent runs multi-step work, like “analyze this folder of documents and summarize gaps”, failures are inevitable. Networks drop. Rate limits happen. Timeouts occur. Without durable state, the agent either restarts from scratch or produces partial results that you cannot reconcile.
When you add auth and multi-tenancy, the agent needs to know what it is allowed to read, write, and delete. In vibe coding, it is common to hand-wave permissions because you are the only user. In production, that is how data leaks happen.
The general principle is simple: prototypes optimize for speed of creation, products optimize for speed of recovery. Agentic coding is the workflow that keeps both.
A practical next step, if this sounds familiar, is to skim our developer docs and keep an eye on the sections about user management, cloud code, and jobs. Those are the pieces that typically turn a “cool demo” into somethi
Source: Dev.to
