Build factories, not features

Two months ago, I was laid off.

There’s no clever framing that makes that land softer. One day I had a team and a roadmap; the next I had a severance email and a lot of quiet mornings.

What I didn’t expect was how much those mornings would change the question I was asking. At first it was obvious: how do I get the next job fast? But it kept shifting into something harder: what does being an engineer even mean from here? The job I lost isn’t quite the job I’m applying for anymore.

So I did what a lot of us do when we’re scared with time on our hands. I read and watched too much. But one talk reframed everything — Andrej Karpathy’s “From Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineering” at Sequoia’s AI Ascent.

One line stuck:

You can outsource your thinking, but you can never outsource your understanding.

It’s easy to point an agent at a problem, get something that runs, and feel productive. Karpathy calls that “vibe coding” — seductive, especially when you’re anxious and want to feel capable again. He contrasts it with agentic engineering: designing the system that builds the system. Same agent, same context, two engineers — wildly different output. The gap isn’t the tool. It’s the judgment.

The layoff made me question whether my judgment was worth much anymore. It’s tempting to think the AI is the threat. But it isn’t replacing the engineer who understands — it’s exposing the difference between that engineer and the one who was just shipping vibes.

So the question sharpened into something I can act on: I think agentic engineering is my future. How do I become an agentic engineer instead of a vibe coding one?

One idea has stuck: build factories, not features.

The vibe coder ships the feature. The agentic engineer builds the system of agents and code that ships it for them — what some call the “dark factory.” Plan, build, validate, review, release, all templated and reproducible, so one good prompt returns an on-spec result instead of a lucky one. You stop being the worker on the line and become the person who designs the line.

But a factory you don’t understand is a liability, not an asset. Use the agents to build the system, but never ship a line I couldn’t explain — the moment I can’t, it’s just vibe coding at scale. So that’s the work now: not racing agents on speed, but building the system and keeping the understanding that makes it trustworthy. That’s the part I refuse to outsource.

I’m writing this partly to convince myself. But if you’re between roles and quietly panicking that the ground is shifting — you’re not behind because you got laid off. We’re all a little behind. The window where this is new is closing fast, and that’s the good news: there’s still time to be early.

For the first time in two months, the future feels less like a threat and more like a question I get to answer.

If you’re becoming an agentic engineer too — or figuring out how — I’d love to hear how you’re approaching it.