I Vibe-Coded My Own Productivity App for Two Days as a Senior Engineer. Here's What Happened.

I've been using AI as a coding assistant for a while now. My usual approach: treat it like a senior developer who occasionally hallucinates after a rough night. Capable, fast, but usually not a great idea to merge their PR without reading it first. That means I review every line. If something gets generated that I don't fully understand, I stop and ask for an explanation before I let it into the codebase. If it violates how I'd normally structure something, I say so and we refactor. The AI proposes, I dispose or approve, or redirect. It's collaborative, but I'm in the driver's seat (although I don't actually have a drivers license). I also always work in plan mode, or at minimum ask it to outline what it's about to do before touching a file. That habit alone has saved me from a lot of "wait, why did it rewrite three components to fix one bug" moments. So when I decided to try vibe-coding, genuinely handing over the wheel, auto-edit on, no review gate... I kind of expected it would go w