Practice · 2024–now · AI Present
Vibe coding
Accept AI output on feel, skip the diff, hope tests exist. Fast demos; fragile ownership.
Vibe coding failed production because accountability does not transfer with generated code. It works for throwaway prototypes and hurts when security and edge cases matter. The tool stuck; the practice of skipping review will age like "move fast and break things" with extra CVEs.
Cost of the fad
Ship-to-prod without reading the diff became a flex until incidents revealed nobody knew which prompt wrote the auth middleware. Review debt arrived in one weekend demo.
Patterns
Context
The stack gets a co-pilot
AI pair programming is already changing how code is written. Agent frameworks and vector stores are still sorting winners from demos. The durable layer will look familiar: evals, retrieval quality, product UX, and ownership. Autopilot rewrites without tests are just big-bang migrations with better slides.
Compare with
Related
Practice · 2021–now
AI pair programming
Autocomplete that actually understands the file. Changing how code is written faster than how it's reviewed.
Practice · 2023–now
AI will rewrite the codebase
Big-bang rewrite, now with a chatbot. Same failure mode; prettier slides.
$ Exec decks promised autonomous migrations "by next quarter." Teams that skipped tests, ownership, and incremental strangler patterns bought expensive demos and fragile diffs.
Framework · 2023–now
LLM app frameworks
Chains, agents, and prompt wrappers shipping weekly. The durable pieces will be boring: evals, retrieval, and product UX.