Beyond Vibe Coding: When AI Should Work Without You

In February 2025, Andrej Karpathy coined a term that perfectly captured the moment: vibe coding.

"You just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works."

He was describing a new way of programming — one where you sit in an AI-powered editor like Cursor or Copilot, describe what you want in natural language, and let the AI generate code in real time. You guide it. You accept or reject suggestions. You iterate together.

It's pair programming with an AI copilot, and it genuinely works. For solo developers, side projects, and rapid prototyping, vibe coding is a superpower.

But here's the thing: vibe coding still requires you to be there.

You're still the pilot. The AI is the copilot. And that means every line of code, every feature, every bug fix still needs a human sitting in front of a screen, prompting, reviewing, and steering.

For a solo dev building a weekend project, that's fine. For an engineering team with 200 tickets in the backlog? It doesn't scale.

What Is Vibe Coding, Exactly?

Vibe coding is human-in-the-loop AI-assisted coding. The pattern looks like this:

1. You open an AI-powered editor (Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot, Cline)
2. You describe what you want in natural language
3. The AI generates code in real-time
4. You review, accept, modify, or reject the suggestions
5. You run the code, see what happens, and iterate

The key characteristic: you are always present. You're steering the conversation, making decisions, and validating output in real time.

This is a massive productivity boost over writing everything from scratch. Studies suggest 30-55% faster coding with AI assistants. But it's still fundamentally a 1:1 interaction — one human, one AI, one task at a time.

The Limitation Nobody Talks About

Vibe coding optimizes the writing part of software development. But writing code is only a fraction of what engineering teams actually do:

• Reading tickets and understanding requirements — 20-30% of an engineer's time
• Understanding the codebase — navigating existing code, finding the right files, understanding patterns
• Code review — reviewing PRs, leaving comments, requesting changes
• Iteration — addressing review feedback, fixing issues, re-submitting
• Context switching — jumping between tickets, repos, and conversations

Vibe coding helps with the middle part — the actual coding. But the full lifecycle of a ticket, from "assigned" to "merged," involves a lot more than writing code.

And critically: vibe coding can only work on one thing at a time. While you're vibe coding feature A, tickets B through Z are waiting.

Enter Agentic Coding

What if the AI didn't need you in the loop at all?

Agentic coding is the next evolution. Instead of an AI assistant that waits for your prompts, an agentic coding platform operates autonomously:

1. It reads the ticket requirements (from Jira, Asana, or any ticket board)
2. It scans your codebase to understand context, patterns, and conventions
3. It plans the implementation
4. It writes the code
5. It creates a pull request
6. It reviews its own work (or another AI agent reviews it)
7. It addresses feedback and iterates
8. You approve and merge

The human role shifts from pilot to reviewer. You're not writing code — you're approving it.

Vibe Coding vs. Agentic Coding

	Vibe Coding	Agentic Coding
Human role	Pilot (actively steering)	Reviewer (approving results)
Input	Natural language prompts	Structured tickets
Output	Code in your editor	Complete pull requests
Concurrency	1 task at a time	Multiple tickets in parallel
Code review	You review manually	AI reviews automatically
Best for	Solo devs, prototyping	Teams with backlogs
Tools	Cursor, Copilot, Windsurf	Synlets, Devin, Factory
Scaling	Linear (1 dev = 1 AI)	Multiplicative (1 PM = N agents)

Neither approach is "better" in absolute terms. They solve different problems.

When Vibe Coding Is the Right Choice

Vibe coding excels when:

• You're exploring — prototyping, experimenting, building something new where requirements aren't clear yet
• You're a solo developer — the overhead of writing detailed tickets doesn't make sense
• The task requires creativity — UI design, architecture decisions, novel algorithms where human judgment is essential
• You need real-time iteration — "try this, no try that, actually go back" — the rapid feedback loop is the point

If you're building a side project on a Saturday afternoon, Cursor with vibe coding is unbeatable. You think it, you say it, it appears.

When Agentic Coding Is the Right Choice

Agentic coding excels when:

• You have a backlog — 50, 100, 200 tickets waiting for implementation
• Requirements are defined — tickets have clear acceptance criteria, and the codebase has established patterns
• You need parallelism — multiple features and fixes need to happen simultaneously
• Code review is a bottleneck — PRs sit for days waiting for reviewer bandwidth
• Non-technical stakeholders need results — PMs, founders, and CTOs who can describe what they want but can't write the code
• You want consistency — the same coding standards, the same PR format, the same review process, every time

This is where platforms like Synlets operate. You don't sit in an editor. You assign a Jira ticket to an AI agent, and you get a pull request back — reviewed, tested, and ready for your approval.

The Workflow Difference

Vibe Coding Workflow:

Developer opens Cursor → describes feature → AI suggests code →
developer reviews → accepts/modifies → tests → creates PR →
reviewer reviews → comments → developer fixes → merge

Time: hours. Requires the developer throughout.

Agentic Coding Workflow:

PM creates Jira ticket → assigns to AI → agent reads codebase →
implements feature → creates PR → AI reviews → addresses feedback →
human approves → merge

Time: minutes to get the PR. Human time: just the final review.

They're Complementary, Not Competitive

The smartest teams will use both:

• Vibe coding for exploratory work, prototyping, and tasks that need human creativity
• Agentic coding for defined tickets, maintenance work, bug fixes, and scaling output

Think of it like driving vs. self-driving. Sometimes you want to be behind the wheel — feeling the road, making split-second decisions, enjoying the drive. Other times, you just need to get from A to B, and you'd rather let the car handle it while you focus on something else.

The backlog doesn't need you to vibe with it. It needs to get done.

The Future Is Both

Vibe coding democratized AI-assisted development. It showed us that natural language is a valid programming interface.

Agentic coding takes that further: what if the AI doesn't just assist — what if it executes?

The question isn't whether AI can write code. We're past that. The question is: does it need you sitting there while it does?

For a growing number of tasks, the answer is no.

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Keep reading:

• Synlets vs Cursor: AI Agents vs AI Code Editor — Detailed feature comparison
• What is an Autonomous AI Developer? — The category defined
• How Synlets works with Jira — See agentic coding in action with Jira
• How Synlets works with Asana — Assign a task, get a PR

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Synlets is an agentic coding platform that implements your Jira and Asana tickets as working pull requests — with AI code review built in. Get started free.