The Vibe Check
Here’s the habit that separates good vibe coders from people who ship garbage: review everything your agent generates before you accept it.
This doesn’t mean reading every line character by character. It means developing a quick mental checklist:
- Does it do what I asked? Not what the agent thought I asked. What I actually asked.
- Does it fit the codebase? Same patterns, same conventions, same style.
- Are there side effects? Did it change files I didn’t expect? Did it add dependencies I didn’t ask for?
- Does it handle edges? What happens with null? With empty strings? With a list of 10,000 items?
- Can I explain it? If you can’t explain what the code does, you don’t understand it well enough to ship it.
Step 5 is the one that gets skipped the most. “It works” is not the same as “I understand why it works.” One of those survives contact with production. The other one pages you at 3am.
The git diff Ritual
After every agent interaction, run git diff. Look at what changed. This is your vibe check. It takes 30 seconds and it catches problems that would take hours to debug in production.
Make it muscle memory. Agent generates code → git diff → review → commit or revert. Every time.
Review every change your agent makes before committing. Run git diff. Read it. If something looks wrong or confusing, ask your agent to explain it. Never commit code you don’t understand.