#S2.07 Agentic Engineering Is Bringing XP Back - Ben Hoskins (NewStore)

About this episode

Benjamin Hoskins joins Beyond Vibe Coding to discuss what agentic engineering looks like when it is grounded in serious engineering practice rather than prompt-driven improvisation. His personal workflow combines a custom Card Planner, MCP, Allium, big batches of red unit and end-to-end tests, boundary value analysis, hexagonal architecture, IntelliJ-based refactoring, and regular architectural review. The interesting point is not the tool list. It is the comprehensive use of the feedback loop: give agents a precise behavioral specification, make tests fail first, and then let the system implement against constraints.

The organizational story is equally concrete. At NewStore, Hoskins pushed AI adoption after building a point-of-sale system in four days and using it as a demonstration of what competitors could soon do. Since then, teams have started sharing prompts and skills, role descriptions have changed, and smaller temporary squads are becoming more viable. But the conversation resists the simplistic "engineering gets faster, everything is solved" story. In SaaS, the bottleneck often moves to product because customer adoption, commercial due diligence, integration cost, product taste, and learning loops determine whether faster delivery creates value or just more average features.

An interesting idea Ben explains is the canonical product model. Hoskins describes NewStore's attempt to pull product definition together across sales, marketing, customer success, support, product, engineering, design, documentation and APIs so that product ideas can be tested against a shared model, potentially with synthetic personas and automated exploratory testing. That makes AI less a coding assistant and more a way for the organization to reason about its own product.

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Links and References

• Beyond Vibe Coding: https://www.bvc.fm/
• Allium by JUXT: https://juxt.github.io/allium/
• DORA metrics: https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics/
• Theory of Constraints Institute: https://www.tocinstitute.org/theory-of-constraints.html
• Extreme Programming: https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/xp/
• Behavior-Driven Development: https://cucumber.io/docs/bdd/
• Hexagonal architecture overview by Alistair Cockburn: https://alistair.cockburn.us/hexagonal-architecture/

Beyond Vibe Coding Podcast is a project by Sebastian Heide-Meyer zu Erpen and André Neubauer, partnering with Impala Search. The content is created by us and our guests. Join the discussion on LinkedIn or visit www.bvc.fm, where we publish all episodes. For questions and inquiries, feel free to contact us via LinkedIn⁠⁠. Thank you for your time and see you in the next episode.