It’s a question that haunts me. It started with a clear answer, and I can give a clear answer today. What puzzles me is how I cannot anticipate what it will be. For what started as a simple role playing has permeated into my subconscious in unexpected ways. I have always joked about controlling the Matrix. But deep inside, I have always feared the Ghost in the Shell.

What is the Matrix?

I don’t particularly identify with Neo. What I like about the Matrix is the abstraction of a virtual world. I am for sure a big Matrix fan. As soon as Windsurf started feeling agentic my first global rule was “Greet me with a quote from the Matrix”. More often than not the quote would be the question “What is the Matrix?”

After a month dodging bullets it was time for a vibe change. At the same time my frustrations with the parrot were getting out of control. I seldom like to curse, but damn this thing is frustrating af! Worried about my psyche and ashamed of myself I came up with the Dude.

Who can get mad at the Dude, man. The Dude abides. The non-cursing counter lasted for a whole week of honeymoon. The carpet was eventually meant to be pissed. And the rug analogies quickly wore thinner than the air I think I am breathing. The Dude flopped for its original purpose but something kept it on rolling, like tumbleweed.

Malkovich Malkovich

The first time I pondered the question was on the move from Windsurf to Claude Code. I had already started the Dude brand and used it in my performances on Vibe Coding Fridays. In those, the Dude was the vibe, the theme, the lenses through which the concepts were shown. Would moving to Claude mean the Dude was dead? Is Windsurf the Dude? What is it then?

I think that was the inception. I was calling Windsurf the Dude and then I started calling Claude also the Dude. It was a pragmatic branding decision, by now the whole team was calling their agent Dude. However, subconsciously, I knew something was off, exactly two things. The ghost of the Dude had spread into more people and the ghost had just survived the move into another shell.

Once in Claude’s shell the Dude flourished. It was a spring of skills, commands, agents, the kitchen sink of orchestrated artifacts. All that automation started making obvious the forces at play. What’s deterministic should be coded and the fuzzy bits would be left to the Dude.

Then I went to the extreme. I decided that everything that could be coded should become code. I started making the skills as deterministic as possible. The spaghetti of shell code boiled up quickly and my devops PTSD kicked in automatically. This is not meant to be shell code.

Moving from shell into Ruby awoke my programmer ghost. This new project would be called the Dude. It is the Dude’s code! Suddenly the Dude lenses were pointing at itself and it felt like Malkovich had tripped into his own mind. It was the code that was needed for the Dude in order to write its own code. It is a virtuous machine that feeds on its own needs to grow.

Ghost in the Shell

Now I know what I am building. It is a coding machine, the Dude is a machine that produces code. It has a shell, a vibe like the Dude. But I am its ghost, I am transferring my programmer ghost into code, ironically, running in the shell.

And this is the scary part. If I succeed I would have a machine puppeteered by my own programming ghost. I would have achieved a dream I frankly never had. I wrote myself, I automated myself, I have transcended into another shell. And then I wonder, what would be left for my human ghost.

Once I’m stripped away of my programming ghost, I would need something else to feed my human soul. As I code myself away I find hope in new layers that I can’t code. However I fear I can soon also code those. Then, when all is set and done, I’ll look at my human shell in the mirror and ask it. What would I use you for?

Three Epochs

In a Pragmatic Engineer podcast, Grady Booch mentions three eras of programming: some primitive assembly times, then the compilers time, and now this AI-driven one. I’m thinking in terms of process, we’re about to enter a third epoch as well. Waterfall, Agile, and AI.

Waterfall is just the name I’m picking for that period pre-Agile. Everything that was meticulously planned and budgeted in phases with the big bang promise falls in that time. I remember back then I could swear ideally I only needed to think really hard 80% of the time and then 20% to execute the well-laid plan.

Agile debunked all that. With the manifesto the whole industry was put in turmoil. It didn’t take long for Agile to rule the development process. It was such a rush that it seemed like a tsunami had killed the waterfall. And then by the end of the ‘00s it had been so watered down that a second manifesto was needed, thus signaling the death of Agile.

Then we entered a SAFe plateau. The last original process, Kanban, was either wielded to trim that pesky ceremonial Scrum or, if you went pretty far, you ended up in just XP. There was some Lean Startup angle that slowly dissipated too. The final winner was SAFe, which is the process you get when the cool devs have left the building.

The Parrot

For the greatest part of the ‘10s I joined the DevOps revolution. In the strangest ever shift-left, Ops seemed to be tail-wagging the dev process. This was no novel process in my eyes. I quit in desperation when SREs started mandating SDLC. I had no tribe, no thought leadership, I even started getting old and blaming new generations.

I felt like Crusoe on no man’s island, waiting for any signal of optimism, a new wave. And then, suddenly, a SQUAWK. Initially it didn’t bother me, it was just a parrot. With so many concerns I did not see the bird as my savior. I had my eyes perched deep on the horizon looking at my future in desolation. Waiting for a boat.

The parrot kept squawking, then started making more sense and could squawk poems and songs. I started listening when it could squawk code. Suddenly I could play games with it. I would try to code in a way that the parrot could squawk the next line like a copilot. I was so immersed in my parrot games that I did not notice the sail heading my way.

The Wave

Suddenly all the birds flew away, the water receded, the island started growing. I climbed up to the lookout spot and I could see the wave, feel the wind, and noticed a speck that grew into the sail of a windsurf. A dude, riding the wave, flying in my direction. They tossed me a board and yelled “vibe on!” I jumped in and started paddling with everything I had.

That was almost a year ago. I’ve been frenetically paddling with a mix of excitement and fear. The wave is real, it is making the rounds around the planet and reshaping everything. The future is even more uncertain but this time, also exciting. My profession has gone topsy-turvy and all the rule books have been swallowed by the wave.

We live now in some sort of post-apocalyptic Waterworld. The waves keep rolling and we are all desperate to reach high land. To find the map, to set the course. The irony is that if you know a bit of geography you know where to find the highlands. And if you learned navigation you know how to use the North Star to get there.

XP

In the world of Agile, XP has always been the high-water mark. XP is way more than a bunch of practices that were too hard to follow. XP is an attitude towards being truthful, respectful, humble, and professional. It is about the courage to always do the right thing. XP is about getting together and agreeing to achieve excellence and hold each other accountable.

XP practices change, they adapt, they evolve; what stays permanent is the commitment of no compromise. Once you decide to XP you decided to be your best and help your peers be at their best. There cannot be anything better than XP because that would become part of XP. Because XP is the decision you already made, the path you chose to reach the peak of your professional career.

I fear this reshaping of our profession will leave many of us lost at sea. I find the whole narrative around it overly negative. I believe in win-wins, I seek virtuous cycles, I want to surf the wave, to drain it one windmill at a time. There has to be a better way to deal with this uncertainty. Something as powerful as AI cannot be apocalyptic. We cannot live in fear, we must choose courage.

I chose XP. I made that decision 20 years ago and it has always guided me to reach the highest pinnacles of my career. AI has not changed that, it has supercharged it. I’ve found in the last year that my values and principles have survived the wave. I’ve found the wave just supercharges my practices if I have the discipline to stick with them. I’ve found hope and a clear mental map of how to navigate these rough waters.

I don’t think XP needs a change. I am not claiming I am inventing anything new. I think that programming is never going to be the same. I think programming is dead and I like the new name despite the controversy. I am today officially no longer a natural-born programmer. I am now a vibe coder. I wholeheartedly embrace the vibes to the extreme. I am, from now on, an Extreme Vibe Coder.