Beyond Vibe Coding

Jürgen Helmers joins Beyond Vibe Coding to explain how Andercore is moving from individual AI usage toward loop and harness engineering across a distributed engineering organization. The conversation gets very concrete: Claude-based workflows, markdown skills, Jira and wiki connectors, engineering vision files, review agents, issue files, blocker/major gates, circuit breakers, milestone loops, red/green agents, automated documentation and model routing across planning, implementation, review and third-party integrations. The interesting point is not the tool list; it is the system around the tools.

The strongest thesis of the episode is that agentic engineering moves the bottleneck left. Once Jürgen's team had loops that could produce and review useful software, the limiting factor became PRD quality, stakeholder clarity and architecture context. Andercore responded with agent-led grilling sessions that poke holes into plans, generate open questions and translate technical issues into the language of logistics, sales or procurement. Faster engineering did not remove planning work. It made weak planning visible much sooner.

The episode also avoids the simple productivity story. Jürgen describes the human cost of running several loops in parallel, the difficulty of keeping a distributed organization in sync when senior engineers adopt the harness quickly, and the unresolved career question of how junior engineers learn when agents abstract away many old failure paths. For CTOs, engineering managers and CPOs, this is a practical conversation about operating model design, not a tooling demo.

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Links and References

Andercore: https://andercore.com/about-us
Dr. Jürgen Helmers on LinkedIn: https://de.linkedin.com/in/dr-j%C3%BCrgen-helmers-94b8969

In this episode of Beyond Vibe Coding, Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen and André Neubauer talk with Jan Brennenstuhl about application security in the age of agentic engineering. Jan explains how his own workflow already depends on long-running local agents, why the surrounding harness matters more than the frontier model, and why spec-driven approaches can be useful when agents make greenfield projects grow very quickly.

The main conversation focuses on a structural shift in AppSec. Jan argues that traditional security gates, delayed scanner feedback, and ticket-based remediation cannot keep up with machine-speed code generation. Security has to move into the agent loop, into platform defaults and into standardized engineering infrastructure so that agents replicate secure patterns instead of every local workaround and architectural exception.

The episode closes with a prediction: verification of intent becomes the premium engineering capability. As implementation gets cheaper, the valuable work shifts toward understanding what should be built, proving that it was built correctly, and designing engineering systems that can safely absorb autonomous change.

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Links and References

Jan Brennenstuhl: https://www.janbrennenstuhl.eu/
AppSec in the Age of Agentic Engineering: https://www.janbrennenstuhl.eu/appsec-agentic-engineering/
Shift Down: Why Agentic Engineering Demands Platform-Level Security: https://www.janbrennenstuhl.eu/shift-down-appsec/
Hugging Face Security Incident Disclosure, July 2026: https://huggingface.co/blog/security-incident-july-2026
OpenAI and Hugging Face Security Incident Statement: https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/
AGNTCon + MCPCon Europe 2026: https://agntconmcpconeu26.sched.com/

Pedro Gil Carvalho, VP Engineering at Thermondo, joins Sebastian and Andre to discuss how a company with real-world operational constraints approaches agentic engineering. The episode starts with Pedro's own workflow: Claude Code acts as a chief of staff across Slack, Confluence, email, research, and codebase exploration, while his personal agent experiments help him evaluate what new models can actually do.

The core of the conversation is Thermondo's operating model for AI in engineering, product, and design. Pedro describes weekly knowledge-sharing sessions, shared skills, AI-assisted product prototypes, component-driven design workflows, and a careful distinction between code touched by AI and code landed without human oversight. The key theme is accountability: humans do not need to write every line, but they remain responsible for the systems they ship.

The episode then moves into architecture, code review, knowledge bases, and synthetic workers. Pedro argues that higher agent autonomy requires solid platform boundaries, strong safeguards, observability, and humans who understand the platform well enough to recover. His prediction: a lot of procedural office work is closer to agentic automation than most organizations think, especially once data, tools, permissions, and hybrid-search knowledge surfaces improve.

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Links and References

Steve Yegge’s article: https://steve-yegge.medium.com/the-flat-curve-society-36c8b01eb33b 

Beyond Vibe Coding Podcast is a project by Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen and André Neubauer, partnering with Impala Search. The content is created by us and our guests. Join the discussion on LinkedIn or visit www.bvc.fm, where we publish all episodes. For questions and inquiries, feel free to contact us via LinkedIn⁠⁠. Thank you for your time and see you in the next episode.

Stefan Lange-Hegermann joins Beyond Vibe Coding to explain how sipgate thinks about AI sovereignty from the inside of a real product and engineering organization. The episode starts with sipgate's AI telephony work: speech-to-text, LLMs, text-to-speech, anonymized customer data, fine-tuned call-analysis models and the strategic belief that agents will increasingly use software on behalf of humans. Stefan's operating lesson is that context is the real infrastructure, whether it lives in Markdown folders, transcripts, internal agents or product strategy.

The main story is sipgate's GLM 5.2 experiment. After concerns that access to key frontier models could change for European companies, sipgate rented Blackwell-class machines in Finland and asked developers to try an open-weight coding model for a week. The surprising result was not only that the model worked; it was that roughly 80 concurrent sessions ran without saturation, developers found it faster than Claude Code, and quality was close enough that some wanted access back. For sipgate, sovereignty is therefore not only a privacy topic. It is access to models, hardware and the engineering leverage the company now depends on.

The episode avoids a naive "just buy GPUs" conclusion. Stefan repeatedly comes back to the harness: companies need consistent tooling, model routing, protective defaults and a clear distinction between coding workloads, customer-facing voice workloads and sensitive customer data. The future may combine central infrastructure, open-weight models such as GLM and Kimi, European model options such as Mistral, specialized smaller models and deterministic scripts where AI is not needed. The honest prediction is that nobody knows exactly how work will look next year, but the teams that control context, defaults and infrastructure will have more options.

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Links and References
sipgate: https://www.sipgate.de/
Stefan's boat podcast, Anker, Ärger, Abenteuer: https://www.podcast.de/podcast/3351826/anker-aerger-abenteuer-der-boote-podcast
GLM-5.2 by Z.ai: https://z.ai/blog/glm-5.2
OpenCode: https://github.com/sst/opencode
Aider: https://aider.chat/
Obsidian: https://obsidian.md/

Beyond Vibe Coding Podcast is a project by Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen and André Neubauer, partnering with Impala Search. The content is created by us and our guests. Join the discussion on LinkedIn or visit www.bvc.fm, where we publish all episodes. For questions and inquiries, feel free to contact us via LinkedIn⁠⁠. Thank you for your time and see you in the next episode.

Benjamin Hoskins joins Beyond Vibe Coding to discuss what agentic engineering looks like when it is grounded in serious engineering practice rather than prompt-driven improvisation. His personal workflow combines a custom Card Planner, MCP, Allium, big batches of red unit and end-to-end tests, boundary value analysis, hexagonal architecture, IntelliJ-based refactoring, and regular architectural review. The interesting point is not the tool list. It is the comprehensive use of the feedback loop: give agents a precise behavioral specification, make tests fail first, and then let the system implement against constraints.

The organizational story is equally concrete. At NewStore, Hoskins pushed AI adoption after building a point-of-sale system in four days and using it as a demonstration of what competitors could soon do. Since then, teams have started sharing prompts and skills, role descriptions have changed, and smaller temporary squads are becoming more viable. But the conversation resists the simplistic "engineering gets faster, everything is solved" story. In SaaS, the bottleneck often moves to product because customer adoption, commercial due diligence, integration cost, product taste, and learning loops determine whether faster delivery creates value or just more average features.

An interesting idea Ben explains is the canonical product model. Hoskins describes NewStore's attempt to pull product definition together across sales, marketing, customer success, support, product, engineering, design, documentation and APIs so that product ideas can be tested against a shared model, potentially with synthetic personas and automated exploratory testing. That makes AI less a coding assistant and more a way for the organization to reason about its own product.

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Links and References

Beyond Vibe Coding: https://www.bvc.fm/
Allium by JUXT: https://juxt.github.io/allium/
DORA metrics: https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics/
Theory of Constraints Institute: https://www.tocinstitute.org/theory-of-constraints.html
Extreme Programming: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/xp/
Behavior-Driven Development: https://cucumber.io/docs/bdd/
Hexagonal architecture overview by Alistair Cockburn: https://alistair.cockburn.us/hexagonal-architecture/

Beyond Vibe Coding Podcast is a project by Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen and André Neubauer, partnering with Impala Search. The content is created by us and our guests. Join the discussion on LinkedIn or visit www.bvc.fm, where we publish all episodes. For questions and inquiries, feel free to contact us via LinkedIn⁠⁠. Thank you for your time and see you in the next episode.