Field notes, written as I ship. Newest first.
4 posts
After a year of AI pair programming, I optimize my editor for reviewing, not writing. I format only modified ranges to keep diffs honest, switch to inline diffs, bind word-by-word accept and next-hunk navigation to fast keys, keep a short instructions file in version control, auto-approve only safe local commands, and commit constantly. The settings all follow one shift: I read far more code than I write now.
I take a two-year-old expense-splitter app with a rotting stack and rebuild it from scratch in a single weekend. I scaffold the plumbing fast with an AI app builder, then spend my real hours on the settle-up logic and UX I actually care about. The takeaway: scaffold the boring parts, hand-build the soul, model the data before the UI, and ship the unglamorous last 20% the same weekend.
I wire an MCP server to my IDE's agent in about thirty minutes, and suddenly it reads my real Postgres schema and project files instead of hallucinating. MCP is just a standard way for agents to call external tools. I pick one server that solves a real annoyance, drop a small JSON config with command, args, and env, restart, and let the agent fetch its own context. That's the whole win.
Hour three of vibe coding is where the magic wears off and the work begins. The agent starts drifting from its own code, re-implementing helpers and calling renamed props. I stay productive by committing at every green moment, re-grounding the context against real files every 30 minutes, narrowing the agent's scope when it wanders, and starting a fresh session when the context gets poisoned. Flow is a tool, not the goal.
