From Autocomplete to Incident
It’s not that I think you shouldn’t vibe code. It’s that I think you shouldn’t let the robots edit your files.
Let’s be honest: once code is in the file, our brains treat it like it must make sense. That’s not a technical flaw—it’s a human one.
This is why we preach TDD. This is why we say “write the test first.” Because the second you write the code, your ability to reason about it collapses. You don’t know what it does anymore. You just know what you meant.
And if that’s true for code you wrote 10 minutes ago, what chance do you have with something a robot autocompleted while you were half-thinking about lunch?
We’ve Always Copied Code. This Is Different.
Let’s not pretend developers used to write every line by hand. We’ve always copied code—from Stack Overflow, from an old repo, from underscore. That’s normal.
But here’s the difference: When you copy code, you read it. You modify it. You decide where it goes. You fix the variable names. You don’t just copy-paste and commit the file.
When the AI edits the file for you, you don’t do that. You don’t even know what it edited. The cognitive load to figure out what just happened is completely different. Your own thoughts are gone, and now you’re supposed to understand the "thoughts" of a statistical model instead.
You just hit a context switch without actually changing your task. Your context became Cursors context. And you are lost.
This is impossible. Give up. Move on. Trust the robot.
Think back to that project you did five years ago.
The company brought in consultants. Great news. They have a PM to plan the whole thing. Engineers to build it. QA to test it. They might even have their own business analyst. You don't have to do any thing and you will just get the final product to maintain.
How excited are you?
They might have even delivered something that technically worked, I mean it's unlikely but it probably mostly worked. There was that weird bug that got reported that's pretty clearly a feature based on the code. And the math doesn't seem to be right, but it's probably fine. I mean someone wrote it and tested it.
After all, the AI people keep telling us it’s just a poor to average junior engineer.
And it’s not like you aren't merging their code without ever reading it.