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May 6, 2025

Vibe Coding Workshop For Leaders (September 2025, ETLS Vegas)

By Gene Kim

As you know, I’ve been working with Steve Yegge (famous for his 20+ years at Amazon and Google) on our Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond book, which will be released later this year.

I have so much respect and admiration for Steve’s work. For over a decade, I‘ve been quoting his famous rant about Google and Amazon, which landed him on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.  It was one of the best depictions of the $1B+ re-architecture of Amazon in the 2010s, when they started decoupling their monolith into microservices, enabling independence of action.  They went from doing tens of painful and scary deployments per year to 136,000K deployments/day in 2015.

I’m so excited that we will be doing a series of vibe coding for leaders workshops. Our goal is to give you the tools to judge to what extent these amazing technologies can increase developer productivity—and if those productivity gains are real, help you decide what to do about it.

We believe using these tools is the only way to gain a fundamental understanding of this rapidly advancing technology.  You may not have written code in decades, but you’ll learn how much coding has changed, and we believe you’ll re-experience the joy of building cool things all over again during this workshop and beyond.

We will be doing a half-day workshop at the Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit in September. Register here. Space is limited! We hope to see you there!

Gene

So, What is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding is completely reshaping how we create software. Google co-founder Sergey Brin captured this revolution perfectly when he encouraged the Google Ads team to adopt these practices, noting engineers using AI were experiencing “10 to 100x speedups” in their work. 

This is likely to fundamentally transform how software is conceived, built, and maintained. As Brin suggested, the developer’s role is evolving “to being the product engineer, where they decide what the product should do,” freeing them from implementation details to focus on vision and strategy.

Here’s a real-world 100x speedup example: workshop co-leader Steve Yegge, with 30+ years of experience including nearly 20 at Amazon and Google, now routinely generates 12,000 lines of high-quality production and well-tested code per day. He spends $300 per day just on AI tokens, or nearly $80,000 annually, to code with multiple agents at once.

These types of productivity gains may be generalizable to most developers. If so, senior leaders may be faced with a serious (and maybe even scary) choice. Either forgo the productivity gains and risk being left behind, or start having some serious discussions about where to find the money, potentially impacting existing team structures and ways of working.

Our Workshop: Executive Summary

We believe this hands-on knowledge will help you make better decisions about AI than any analyst report or high-priced consultant (who will probably know less about it than you do already!).

  • Experience transformative productivity firsthand: Witness how AI-assisted coding can deliver the “10 to 100x speedups” mentioned by Google co-founder Sergey Brin, allowing you to make informed decisions about AI adoption based on personal experience rather than analyst reports.
  • Understand the strategic implications: Learn how vibe coding shifts developer focus from implementation details to vision and strategy, potentially transforming team structures and resource allocation within your organization.
  • Develop practical risk management strategies: Gain critical insights into both the opportunities and challenges of AI-assisted development, including how to prevent “eldritch horror” codebases that work initially but become impossible to maintain.
  • Build a realistic implementation roadmap: Discover through hands-on exercises how to safely integrate vibe coding practices into your enterprise environment, with case studies showing how complex organizations are capturing value beyond the hobby projects seen on social media.
  • Prepare your organization for the future: Position yourself to lead the transition as AI fundamentally changes software development, learning from experienced practitioners who are already investing significantly ($80K/year) in these tools to achieve demonstrable productivity gains.

This four-hour hands-on workshop, led by Steve Yegge and me, cuts through the hype and teaches you why and how to use vibe coding and how you can use it to help you, your team, and your organization win.

This workshop is ideal for:

  • Technology People Leaders (CTOs, CIOs, VPs, Head of Engineering, Directors): Gaining firsthand experience is crucial if you need to make informed strategic decisions about AI adoption, understand its real impact on team structure and workflows, and lead your organization through this transition effectively. (You will likely also rediscover the joy of building cool things again, as we have!)
  • Individual Contributor Leaders (Senior and Principal Engineers, Architects): If you want to dramatically boost the productivity for both yourself and those around you (based on our experience, we think 10x-100x are possible) by having the AI help with the tedious aspects of implementation, focus on solving more interesting and ambitious problems, and build better tools faster, this is for you.
  • Anyone Seeking to Thrive in the AI Era: If you recognize that AI is fundamentally changing software creation and want to acquire the skills, mindset, and practical techniques needed to not just survive but thrive, this workshop provides the foundation.

What You’ll Learn

Join Steve and me in this hands-on workshop based on our upcoming book, Vibe Coding: Building Production-Grade Software With GenAI, Chat, Agents, and Beyond. You will gain both theoretical understanding and practical experience in:

Theory & Mindset:

  • The “Why” of Vibe Coding: Understand the fundamental shift AI brings to software development, moving beyond hype to grasp the real opportunities and challenges.
  • The FAAFO Framework: Learn how vibe coding enables you to build faster, be more ambitious, work alone on complex projects, rediscover the fun, and gain optionality by exploring multiple solutions.
  • Redefining the Developer Role: Embrace the “head chef, not line cook” analogy, shifting focus from manual implementation to directing AI collaborators, evaluating solutions, and taking ownership of outcomes.
  • Understanding the Risks of Vibe Coding: AI can quickly generate incorrect code. Worse, it can create working but incomprehensible code bases that become impossible to maintain or modify, requiring complete rewrites when changes are needed.
  • Vibe Coding for Side-Projects vs. Vibe Coding Inside Enterprises: YouTube and X/Twitter are full of examples of how to build games and hobby projects. We’ll present case studies of how large, complex organizations are starting to capture the value of developers’ vibe coding.
  • Navigating the Future: Understand the trajectory of AI development and how skills are evolving, positioning yourself for long-term relevance and success.
  • Your responsibility as a leader: How do you actually achieve the gains in your organization that vibe coding should be able to unlock

Practice & Skills:

  • Hands-On Vibe Coding: Engage in practical exercises using chat, agents, and other GenAI tools to build and modify software.
  • Effective AI Collaboration: Master core techniques like task decomposition, effective prompting, verification strategies (including “count your babies”), hardening AI-generated code, and managing AI agents.
  • Essential Engineering Disciplines for AI: Learn how to adapt crucial practices like creating fast feedback loops (validation, verification) and building modularity to work effectively and safely with AI.
  • Accelerated Learning Techniques: Discover how to rapidly learn and adapt in the fast-paced AI landscape, leveraging AI itself as a learning partner and developing critical judgment (“warning signs detector”).

Call To Action

Space is strictly limited. Register to secure your spot!

About the Workshop Leads

Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for thirteen years. He is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose books have sold over 1 million copies. His list of books includes Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate.

Steve Yegge began his career as a computer programmer at GeoWorks in 1992 and worked at Amazon from 1998 to 2005 as a senior engineer and senior manager. From 2005 to 2018, Yegge worked as a senior staff engineer and senior engineering manager at Google. There, he built a system called Grok that was wired into Google’s internal Code Search system, which had a 99% satisfaction rating within Google (soundly beating the next-best tool by double digits). He became Head of Engineering at Grab, a ride-share and payments company based in Singapore.  Beginning in 2022, he helped lead the development of the Cody AI assistant at Sourcegraph (which commercialized the Code Search system that Steve built at Google), and wrote the “Death of the Junior Developer” post in 2024. 

- About The Authors
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Gene Kim

Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. His books have sold over 1 million copies—he is the WSJ bestselling author of Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, and co-author of The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit (now Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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1 Comment

  • Anonymous May 10, 2025 2:21 pm

    Very interested in this workshop for our organization and we are unable to join physically. Hoping you will offer a virtual version in the future so we can send some folks! Great work as always Gene. Thank you.

    Reply

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