Vibe Agile
Before Vibe Coding, There Was Vibe Agile
Before Vibe Coding, there was Vibe Agile. Almost everyone has seen vibe Agile in action:
“Let's do the Spotify model, because the video is rad.”
“We should do the Scrum of Scrums, because it's like Scrum but even more fire🔥🔥🔥 .”
“To fix out ‘scaling problems’, let’s introduce SAFe, because it slays 🐉. ”
And we all know where that brought us:
Lots of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches being let go.
Style over substance is a common theme in the post truth era, until the vibe sky comes crashing down. Copy-Paste-Fail happens right under your eyes when you’re too busy vibing to notice. Our vibes become so high, that we begin floating and soaring like an eagle.
We feel great until we become disconnected from reality because the pursuit of our vibe drowns out the vibrations of reality we should really be paying attention to.
We love chasing proxies, but they’re no substitute for reality.
Important observation, Maarten. I remember 4GLs in the 90s/00s came with all the same promises. They are responsible for almost the entire mess of legacy source code that tens of thousands of programmers spend hundreds of thousands of hours cleaning up, to this day. Been there, done that. The code was a maintenance nightmare. I once created a metric: Lines of Code Removed (LOCR) to measure my progress through this weed jungle. Sometimes 80-90% of the code was pointless. Maybe Vibe is a little more sophisticated...but are its commanders/instructors? I am guessing not. Same problem with adopting XP, or Kanban or Scrum, and trying to follow it 'by the book' without actually understanding the underlying concepts—the philosophy, the purpose. Humans always make a mess of things when trying to follow shortcuts, the easier, softer way. Good work of any kind requires good craftsmanship [sic]. We don't seem to have too much of that around these days, and AI makes us believe we don't need it.