The meal that explains vibe coding

Years ago a friend who’d lived in China took me to dinner. She ordered for both of us and flatly refused to tell me what any of it was until the plates were empty. “If I tell you first,” she said, “you won’t eat it.”

The food was genuinely excellent. One dish tasted like tender, perfectly seasoned beef. Afterwards she told me the “beef” was chicken hearts and the “squid” was cow tendon. I’d enjoyed every bite of it, right up until the moment I knew what it was.

That dinner is the cleanest picture of vibe coding I’ve got. The app looks good. It runs, which is the software version of tasting good. But if you never read what the model actually wrote, you have no idea what’s on the plate. Usually that’s completely fine. Occasionally it’s a payment handler quietly charging people twice, and you find out the way I found out about the chicken hearts, which is to say after the fact, once it’s already inside you.

So I still let the AI cook. It’s faster and often better than me at the stove. I just read the menu now before I swallow anything, especially near money, auth, or anything that touches a real customer.