Engineering leadership for the agentic era
I'm Felipe Plets, a seasoned engineering leader. Vibe coding and agentic engineering changed how fast software can be produced, but you still need a good strategy for high-quality code. I work with teams on the practices that let velocity rise without sacrificing quality.
The strategic question for engineering leaders isn’t “how do we generate more code?” but “how do we design our engineering practices so quality doesn’t drift as velocity increases?”
About
I started programming in 1999, pulled in by what still makes software worth doing: an idea can become something other people rely on, and what separates the two is mostly craft. Since then I have shipped production systems in Delphi, PHP, C#, Swift, Kotlin, Python, Ruby, ABAP, Java and, still, a great deal of JavaScript. Along the way I published academic work on ubiquitous computing, including a collaborative telemedicine system built to improve diagnosis quality where doctors were scarce.
I have been in leadership roles since 2006: developer, team lead, coach, consultant, director, founder. Different titles, the same job. Helping teams design a development lifecycle that produces consistent gains in productivity, quality, performance and security, then holding the line on it. I have done that with teams in different countries and in every arrangement you can name, from co-located rooms to groups spread across time zones to fully remote organizations.
Today I work as a director of engineering and write about the shift happening around all of us. The promise of AI-assisted and agentic development is real, and so is the failure mode: organizations that get dramatically faster at producing code they no longer understand. My work is about taking the first outcome without the second, and most weeks I am comparing notes with other engineering leaders living exactly that problem.
The practice
AI changed how quickly code appears. It did not change what makes software worth trusting. Most of my work sits at that intersection.
Vibe coding and agentic engineering dramatically increase how fast code can be produced. High-quality code still requires planning, architecture and experienced judgement. Without strong guardrails, average quality drifts down quietly, and then all at once.
The biggest leadership challenge right now is not AI adoption. It is building teams that collaborate with AI rather than consume its output the way they once consumed search results.
Alignment has always been the hard problem in organizations. As AI becomes part of the work, that alignment has to extend to how teams use models: which ones, for which tasks, judged against which standards.
Leaders need to talk about AI with evidence, not vibes. Models change weekly and the claims about them change faster. Decisions should rest on how tools perform on your work, not on how they are marketed.
Writing
Leadership, technology, and personal growth, written from the lens of a hands-on engineering leader.
Get it in your inbox
Essays on leadership, AI-assisted delivery and the craft of building software that lasts. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
Hey there, let’s talk about burnout and prioritization.
Leadership isn’t what happens to you, it’s what you do next.
What does an All You Can Eat buffet have to do with leadership? More than you think. And it’s where this whole project began.
Speaking & work
Most of my engagements start with the same conversation: the team is using AI, output is up, and nobody is quite sure whether that is good news yet.
Conference and internal sessions on what actually changes when agents join the team, and what stubbornly does not.
Hands-on sessions that move a team from ad-hoc AI usage to a repeatable, reviewable way of building.
Working with engineering leaders on delivery practices, quality strategy and the operating model behind them, informed by having built companies as well as run engineering inside them.
Contact
Whether you are three months into an AI rollout or still deciding where to start, I am happy to compare notes. The newsletter is the easiest place to keep in touch, and everything else is below.
Subscribe to All You Can Lead