I started writing production code in 2014, long before “vibe coding” was a term and most of the LLM-assisted tooling existed. The first decade was hands-on engineering: backend services, web applications, the messier stretch in between.
For five of those years I worked at Smals, one of Belgium's largest IT firms, as a functional analyst, project leader, and Scrum Master. The work was equal parts shipping software and translating between stakeholders, engineers, and product. Going solo carries that operator instinct into smaller, sharper teams.
AI-assisted tooling now lives inside that workflow, used as a force multiplier on top of the engineering discipline, not as a substitute for it.