learning Mar 28, 2026

The ship and the agents

A coworker sent me a summary of Turn the Ship Around this week. The core idea: instead of waiting for permission, crew members say “I intend to…” before acting. The commander stays informed, asks questions, but the ship keeps moving whether he’s available or not.

I read it and immediately thought about my Claude terminals.

The commander who didn’t know his submarine

Marquet was assigned to a submarine he’d never trained on. He didn’t know the systems, the quirks, the details. Out of necessity, he had to trust his department heads to handle the specifics while he focused on the mission.

It worked. The sub went from worst to best in the fleet.

I’ve been thinking about whether vibecoding is the same thing — me as the commander, Claude agents as the department heads, each one running their piece of the codebase while I stay focused on the product.

It’s a comforting frame. But there’s a catch.

The department heads actually knew things

Marquet could trust his crew because they were domain experts. They knew their systems deeply. When a department head said “I intend to run this procedure,” Marquet knew that person had the knowledge to back it up.

Claude agents are brilliant but amnesiac. Each conversation starts fresh. They don’t remember yesterday, don’t know your codebase unless you tell them, don’t carry the institutional knowledge that made Marquet’s approach work.

So the frame only holds if you’re doing the work of giving them context — the PRD, the constraints, the history. If you just jump straight into the problem, you’re not a commander with informed department heads. You’re more like a commander who hired a team of brilliant strangers every morning and hoped for the best.

Three modes

When I’m vibecoding I’m usually in one of three modes:

  1. I know the problem, Claude executes. This is the dream. Clear requirements, well-defined scope, Claude ships it.

  2. I kind of know the problem, we figure it out together. Most days. Iterating, adjusting, slowly converging on something real.

  3. I don’t really know what I’m building, so I build to find out. This one feels cooked. Like I’m discovering the PRD through the code itself, hoping the product reveals itself in the process.

Mode 3 is the one I’d least want to admit to the person who wrote the PRD. But I also think it’s more common than anyone says — and maybe more legitimate than it sounds. Marquet was doing something like this too. He didn’t fully know his submarine. He learned by running it.

Maybe the reframe is simpler

You don’t have to understand every department. But you have to understand the mission.

The code is the department. You’re the commander. And the commander’s job isn’t to know every system — it’s to know where the ship is going and why.

If you’re clear on that, the agents can figure out the rest. If you’re not, no amount of vibecoding will save you.

I’m still working on being clearer on that.