From Roadblocks to Rocket Fuel: Evolving Engineering Leadership in a Vibing World

What an exciting time to be a technologist. At Trackable, Patrick, our COO, has started vibe coding a lot of tools including a completely new marketing page that looks beautiful. I’ve thought deeply for the last few months about how my role as the engineering leader of the company needs to evolve with these tools and something I believe very strongly is that I need to empower him and others on the team instead of putting up roadblocks. When I started using claude code in late summer last year, I realized that everything I considered a best practice was up for review. I believe strongly in enabling people, but security is always priority number one, so how do I enable Patrick but make sure everything maintains the highest levels of security?

Regular security reviews, obviously, and also custom lint rules to enforce that agents use best practices, but what else? One best practice that I’m throwing away now is a tendency towards monolith applications. I have held a belief that service oriented architecture is best when it aligns on teams, and teams align on products, but avoid it as much as possible because it slows companies down with overhead. But now I’m realizing that SOA might be the solution I’m looking for because I can enforce strong security on the API side, maintained by Engineering, and allow vibing on UI for fast iteration by the non-devs.

The security reviews are still pretty critical though.