As company is pushing engineers to do more and more agentic coding (vibe coding), there is a growing anxiety among the software engineering community about losing their skills. In fact more and more software engineer have reported losing skills after monthly long vibe coding, and even worse, losing interest in software engineering.
In the age of uncertainty, we often look to the past to find answers for the future. To find the solution, I have to look back 500 years to the workshops of the Old Masters. Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, and Rembrandt didn’t work alone. They ran “studios” where they delegated the majority of the physical labor to apprentices. Yet, they remained the greatest technicians of their age.
Here is how the Old Master framework can save the Senior Engineer in the age of agentic coding.
1. The “Final Touch” (Quality Control over Manual Labor)
In a Renaissance workshop, apprentices ground the pigments and painted the “dead coloring”—the broad, repetitive strokes of skies and backgrounds. The Master stepped in only for the hands and faces, the most difficult and expressive parts of the piece.
In software, you should treat your agents as the apprentice. They can grind the boilerplate, write the CRUD operations, and set up the unit test skeletons. Your job is the Final Touch. You are responsible for the edge cases, the complex concurrency logic, and the security boundaries. By offloading the “boring” code, you focus 100% of your energy on the 10% of the architecture that actually requires a senior mind. Your skill doesn’t atrophy; it becomes more concentrated.
2. Design as the Highest Intellectual Act
For the Old Masters, disegno (the design and composition) was the “soul” of the art. The physical act of applying paint was secondary to the intellectual act of solving the perspective, the lighting, and the narrative.
Today when you use agentic tools, your “syntax” is no longer just semicolons; it is system design, data flow, and mental modeling. To lead an agent effectively, you must have a clearer mental model of the system than ever before. If your design is flawed, the agent will simply “hallucinate” your bad architecture faster. Seniority now resides in the ability to conceptualize the “blueprint” that the agent executes.
3. Corrective Painting (The Art of the Code Review)
Masters stayed sharp by fixing the mistakes of their students. They would walk through the studio, spot a poorly rendered shadow, and with three strokes of a brush, fix the entire perspective.
In an agentic world, your primary activity becomes High-Frequency Code Review. You will and you should read more code than you write. Just as a Master had to “see” the error in a student’s work, you must develop a “spidey sense” for the subtle bugs an LLM introduces. Correcting an agent’s output requires a deeper understanding of the “why” than simply writing it yourself from scratch. You aren’t just a coder; you are the “Technical Editor-in-Chief.”
4. The Workshop as a Laboratory
The great workshops were centers of R&D. Masters used apprentices to test new types of oil glazes or canvas primers. This allowed the Master to innovate without being bogged down in the trial-and-error phase.
Agentic coding allows you to prototype at the speed of thought. Use agents to “stress test” three different architectural patterns in an afternoon. While the agent does the “manual testing” of the implementation, you observe the results. This allows you to stay at the cutting edge of technology by seeing more patterns in a month than you used to see in a year.
Final Thought: Don’t Put Down the Brush
The Old Masters didn’t stop painting; they stopped doing the repetitive parts of painting.
If you want to stay sharp in the age of AI, don’t just “vibe” and walk away. Engage with the output. Refine the edges. Fix the “hands and faces” of your codebase. The agents are your apprentices—they are there to amplify your genius, not to replace your judgment.
Additional: Read Other Master’s Work
Old masters copy each other too, they learn the best technique from each other to enhance their own skills. In the agentic era, it has become easier than ever to learn other code. I use a collection of highly polished open source software as reference for my many works. Use Codex’s ‘explain this codebase’, use copilot to put a comment prefix on top of the block of code and it will automatically generate summaries. After all we love coding because we love to learn.