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The Vibecoding Ladder: a simple step-by-step guide
While we r still in an endless storm of LLM-related noise, I wrote this brief piece as my yet another attempt to help colleagues navigate in the space. Currently, most of us know many various concerns of how LLMs work, and yet pretty much all of us, at some point, hit a knowledge gap we couldn't have imagined existing.
To iron that out, I built the ladder below — the onboarding into vibecoding I'd have wanted for myself. Between the levels you'll also find answers to questions you've probably had: why build custom tools when you can stay in retail, where overengineering actually starts, and many others.
STAGE I — Learn to trust the agent
Level 0. You use the chat app — you ask, it answers. It's an assistant; it talks, you act. Vast majority of LLM users are here. This is important to understand because for this vast majority LLM companies actually build their features.
Level 1. You switch on bypass mode and let it run commands on its own. This is where your chatbox becomes an agent — because the agency is acting, not being configured.
Level 2. You find CLAUDE.md, the standing instructions it reads every time, but you barely touch it, so it runs on whatever it happened to pick up from talking to you.
Level 3. You start grooming CLAUDE.md and at some point hit context rot, where that file’s bloat makes the model dumber and it begins hallucinating; the lesson is to keep it tight, because an agent is only as honest as its context. You may also learn to keep your CLAUDE.md file below 200 lines.
Level 4. You stop guessing and write EVALs — small tests that prove it still works. This includes asking for 1-10 scales in answers, benchmarks building, definition of done settings and/or many other methods. This is the step almost everyone skips, and it's where you start measuring instead of hoping. This is a crucial step because here you introduce your Judge agent - it can be your QA, or, in my case, The Order. The core idea is to automate your evaluation.
Level 5. You’ve learned that there are two CLAUDE.mds — global for who the agent always is, and project-specific for what this repo needs. You also learned that your “Keep Claude.MD file below 200 lines” means global claude.md + local claude.md COMBINED must be below 200 lines.
STAGE II — Take yourself out of the loop
Here we should understand that two things grew in parallel at this point: the agent's mind — memory, context, judgment, and its hands — the tools it can touch through MCP, shell, web, and APIs.
Level 6. One agent caps out (~200 lines of combined global and local CLAUDE.md files), so you go multi-agent and delegate some part of your main agent’s work to another agent. You immediately feel the cost — the handoffs, the drift — until you learn to split only when the work won't fit one mind.
Level 7. You find MEMORY.md file — memory that survives across sessions and gets shared between agents, so work accumulates and smart-in-the-moment turns into smart-over-time.
As of now you have it’s real orchestration: a few agents, shared memory, and your Judge agent that runs your EVALs as a gate. By this point you’re basically running a small org.
Level 8. At some point you tear down half of what you’ve built for the sake of optimization. You’ve learned that a lean core is easier to manage, and, importantly, to trust. You realize that autonomy isn't something you add your way into.
Level 9. You’ve made an onboarding protocol, and now your agents start calling each other instead of you, with an orchestrator picking who wakes, handing off, and collecting the results — you are about to get out of most of the small/medium multi-agent operations.
Level 10. Your agents learned to reason together — one drafts, the Judge pushes back, it revises, and the whole thing settles against your EVALs — leaving you human-in-the-loop only for the real calls.
Level 11. Your agents run on their own. Your daily routine is to wake up, see what they’ve built during the night, make sure you and your agents learned the caveats and other important “gotchas”. Then you build the next batch of tasks. Basically most of your own time goes in building an efficient task that will fit into your multi-agent environment perfectly, letting them to deliver to you an exceptionally good output all by themselves.
STAGE III — Cross the domains
Level 12. (Highly speculative. I’m not here yet) You build multiple “departments” of agents, each of which has its own discipline. You have marketing team, BD team, engineering with devs, QAs, etc. All of them have judges and follow the protocol. All of them are aware of each other. You are about to bring in a Product Manager, who will be capable of building the entire projects for you overnight, by using the resources of your departments.
Level 13. ??? One day.
Why bother climbing at all
Everything the big corpos, be it OpenAI, Anthropic and others hand you out of the box is built for the average user, because the average user is the only thing a mass product can be built for. They aren't shipping you the ceiling of what's possible — they're shipping the safe middle that works well enough for millions of people who all want something slightly different. I’m not a conspiracy folk out there. I’m telling you because again, as a senior product manager who built numerous high-impact products for more than a decade, I know that this is the only correct business decision out there.
Still, the default chat window is fine, but it just isn't where the real leverage lives.
Every level on this ladder is a step away from that default and toward something you built yourself, and that's the whole game, because there are really only two ways to stand in this industry.
You can be an LLM user — you log in, you type, you get the same answers everyone else gets, and the market prices you accordingly, as someone who knows how to operate a tool. Your ceiling is the tool's ceiling. You're renting another company's intelligence by the hour, and you get priced exactly like that.
Or you climb off retail and become a one-man tech company, owning the memory, the agents, the evals, the orchestration, and the tools they plug into. The whole machine runs on rails you laid, and it works while you sleep. At that point you've stopped renting intelligence and started owning it — you have IP, you have leverage, and your value stops tracking what you can type in an hour and starts compounding on what you've built.
Retail will never hand you that. It can't, by business design.
Most of you won't change anything in your routine. A few of you will, and I hope this helps you become stronger.
Wolf Alexanyan,
Yerevan, Armenia, June 2026.
