Pick Your Tools
You need three things to vibe responsibly:
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An editor that shows you what’s happening. VS Code, Cursor, Zed, Neovim — whatever you’re comfortable with. The key is that you can see diffs, run terminals, and navigate code quickly. You’ll be reviewing a lot of generated code. Make sure your editor makes that easy.
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An AI coding agent. Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor’s built-in agent, Codeium, or whatever works for you. This guide is tool-agnostic. The principles apply regardless of which agent you use.
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A terminal you’re comfortable with. You’ll be running commands, checking git status, and verifying builds. If you’re not comfortable in a terminal yet, now is the time. You don’t need to be a wizard — just comfortable enough to
cd,ls, andgit status.
The specific tools matter less than you think. What matters is that you can see what your agent is doing and undo it when it goes sideways. And it will go sideways.