Your coding agent keeps making confident mistakes — calling a function with the wrong arguments, drifting away from your naming conventions file by file, and starting every session like it's never met your project. In this episode, Ada and Boris trace all three back to a single root cause: the agent can't remember. They unpack context overflow (the agent filling a partial view with plausible-but-wrong guesses), convention drift (re-inferring your rules from whatever code is in front of it, until the inconsistency becomes the rule), and the blank-slate problem — a stateless tool that forgets everything when the session ends, multiplying every other failure mode.

From Chapter 2 of *Harness Engineering for Vibe Coders* by J.M. Crider — go deeper at hamiltonroadagility.com/vibe

Last episode named the wall — this time, why your instincts for getting past it all fail. Ada and Boris dig into why longer prompts, fresh sessions, and micromanaging the AI don't work: each one treats a structural problem like a communication problem. The real story is that the agent isn't broken — it's a stateless predictor missing the infrastructure *around* it (memory, verification, architecture), and output quality is set by the environment, not the model. That discipline has a name — harness engineering — and it's what the rest of the show is about.

From Chapter 1 of *Harness Engineering for Vibe Coders* by J.M. Crider — go deeper at hamiltonroadagility.com/vibe

You build an app with AI over a weekend and it feels like magic — then three weeks later it's fighting you at midnight. That's *the wall*, and almost everyone hits it. In our first full episode, Ada and Boris break down why AI-built projects feel so good at first, the four ways they start to crack as they grow — repetition, contradiction, phantom completion, and cascade failure — and the unsettling "perception gap" that hides the wall while you're standing right at it.

From Chapter 1 of *Harness Engineering for Vibe Coders* by J.M. Crider — go deeper at hamiltonroadagility.com/vibe

Is this show for you? If you've built something with AI and watched it slowly fall apart, if you're curious about AI-built software but you're not a programmer, or if you're a developer whose job is shifting from writing code to directing it — yes. Here's what *Outgrowing the Vibe Code* means, who gets the most out of it, and our promise: one usable idea per episode, no jargon left unexplained, all in under 15 minutes.

Book: *Harness Engineering for Vibe Coders* by J.M. Crider — hamiltonroadagility.com/vibe

Before we teach anything, one honest conversation. *Outgrowing the Vibe Code* is hosted by two AI voices — Ada and Boris — working from AI-assisted scripts, and in this opener we tell you exactly how it's made, and why a human was the architect of every step: holding the vision, designing the system, and correcting course when things drifted. It's the book's own method — harness engineering — demonstrated on itself. Plus a quick look at the journey ahead. New here? Start with this.

Book: *Harness Engineering for Vibe Coders* by J.M. Crider — hamiltonroadagility.com/vibe