Beyond Vibe Coding

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.

Stefan Schubert-Peters returns to Beyond Vibe Coding to discuss a topic many engineering organizations are only beginning to name: AI adoption and AI identity change are not the same thing. At felmo, a difficult retro around AI, job security and career anxiety made him realize that even experienced engineers who already use AI can still be entering a deeper change curve around what the technology means for their role and future.

The conversation distinguishes two clocks inside the AI transition. The visible clock is adoption: tools, workflows, Codex, Claude, hooks, skills and agentic code. The slower clock is identity: what happens when software engineers, managers, product people, QA and designers have to rethink the craft and boundaries they built their professional identity around. André warns that companies can easily misread adoption dashboards and declare victory while the organization is still in the middle of the real change.

The leadership message is pragmatic: managers need to create safety without pretending the change is optional, show uncertainty without losing direction, and make role evolution explicit instead of leaving people in limbo. The episode points toward a future where engineering roles compact, designers may push PRs, QA changes shape, and product clarity becomes even more important because faster engineering can amplify confusion as easily as output.

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Links and References
felmo: https://felmo.de/
Stefan Schubert-Peters on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stefan-schubert-peters/
Previous Beyond Vibe Coding episode with Stefan: https://www.youtube.com/live/Dle0yrRF9WA
Lenny's Newsletter - How tech workers are feeling in 2026: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-tech-workers-are-feeling-in-2026
Lenny's Podcast - How tech workers actually feel about AI in 2026: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5dDyuNfZYNjVBZ0rl0OAFW

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.

Italo Vietro joins Beyond Vibe Coding to describe how Parloa, a company building AI agents for enterprise customer experience, uses AI internally to change the way engineering works. The episode centers on Parloa's internal "kitchen": a shared harness of skills, agents and workflows that helps engineers with implementation, SRE, security, threat modeling, review and management work.

Also Italo makes the point, that code generation was never the slowest part of software delivery. Parloa saw a high share of code produced through agentic workflows, but that did not automatically improve cycle time. He describes how Parloa methodically automates the full lifecycle: specification, validation, review automation, deployment safety via a comprehensive set of deterministic validations and operational best practices like low-blast-radius rollout, relentless focus on change failure rate and a QRS program.

Italo also gives a useful leadership reality check. Parloa does not force one coding LLM and does not treat AI-native as a permanent differentiator. Tools will standardize and change. The durable advantage is building a strong engineering system, hiring product-minded architects, and keeping the expertise in the organization to understand what AI produces when something breaks when the dark factory becomes a reality.

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Links and References
Italo Vietro: https://italovietro.com/
OpenSpec: https://github.com/Fission-AI/openspec

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.