Down The Rabbit Hole
So, you’ve met the gremlins. You’ve seen them turn a vague idea into a functioning (or at least, function-adjacent) piece of code. Welcome to the club. In my last post, we talked about the chaotic new reality of "vibe engineering"—the art of managing a legion of hyper-fast, logic-brained AI coding assistants. It's less about writing code and more about becoming a perpetually surprised project manager.
But what does that actually look like? Let's move past the philosophy and get our hands dirty. How do you, the newly promoted manager of gremlins, actually guide these brilliant, nonsensical creatures into building something useful without accidentally summoning a badger into your car's engine?
It turns out, the process looks a lot like the software development lifecycle you already know, just with a weird, funhouse-mirror twist. Here's a deeper dive into the day-to-day of a vibe engineer.
The Plan: Your Gremlin Blueprint
You can't just tell a gremlin to "build a house." You'll end up with a_ very_ literal interpretation, possibly with the plumbing on the outside and a front door on the roof. The same goes for code. An instruction as simple as "make a login page" is an invitation for chaos.
The key is to move from a "vibe" to a "spec." This doesn't have to be a fifty-page formal document, but it needs to be precise. Think of it as crafting the perfect Dungeons & Dragons spell. The incantation has to be just right. This is the essence of prompt engineering.
A real-world example? Let's say you need a Python function to pull user data from a new API endpoint.
A bad prompt (the vibe):
"Write a python function that gets user data."
This is how you get a function that tries to scrape a public website, uses an outdated library, and assumes the user data is a text file on a floppy disk.
A good prompt (the spec):
"Act as a senior Python developer. Write a function that retrieves user data from the /api/v1/users endpoint. It should use the requests library, handle potential 404 Not Found errors by returning None, and parse the JSON response to return a dictionary containing the 'username' and 'email' fields."
Notice the difference? We've given our gremlin:
A role: "Act as a senior Python developer." This sets the context and encourages higher-quality code.
Specific tools: "use the requests library."
Clear instructions: "from the /api/v1/users endpoint."
Error handling: "handle potential 404 Not Found errors by returning None."
A defined output: "return a dictionary containing the 'username' and 'email' fields."
This is your new job: translating a fuzzy business need into a set of explicit, unambiguous instructions that an AI can execute. You're the architect, drawing the blueprints before the gremlins start wildly swinging hammers.
The Containment Field: Test-Driven Development is Your Ghost Trap
As we established, an AI's definition of "done" is a lie. It will hand you code with the unshakeable confidence of a magician who just sawed a person in half, neglecting to mention that they don't know how to put them back together. The code might work for the one perfect case it was designed for, but it will shatter at the first sign of an edge case.
This is where Test-Driven Development (TDD) becomes your most powerful weapon. Traditionally, TDD is a discipline that helps ensure code quality. In the age of AI, it's a non-negotiable containment field. You build the trap first, then dare the gremlin to create a ghost that can escape it.
Here’s how it works in practice:
You Write the Test: Before you even think about asking an AI to write code, you write the tests for that code.Let's stick with our user data function. You'd write a test that checks if the function correctly calls the API, a test that checks if it handles a 404 error gracefully, and a test that checks if it parses the JSON correctly.
You Feed the Test to the AI: You can literally include your test code in the prompt. "Here are the pytest tests. Write the Python code that makes these tests pass." This gives the AI an incredibly clear target to aim for.
The AI Writes the Code: The AI now has a clear, measurable goal. It will generate the code specifically to satisfy the conditions you've laid out in your tests.
You Run the Tests: The moment the AI hands you the code, you run the test suite. If it passes, great. If it fails, you have a precise, actionable list of what's wrong.
This workflow turns the AI from a wild guesser into a focused problem-solver. It's the difference between asking a stranger for directions and giving them a specific address to plug into their GPS.
The Finishing School: Relentless Code Review
Even with a perfect plan and a solid test suite, the code an AI generates will often have... questionable taste. It might be functionally correct, but it can also be clunky, inefficient, or completely ignore the established style of your codebase.
Your role now becomes that of a meticulous code reviewer and refactorer. You're not just looking for bugs; you're looking for:
Performance Killers: A classic AI mistake is putting a database query inside a loop (the infamous N+1 problem). A human developer will spot this immediately and refactor it into a single, efficient query.
Security Gaps: AI models are trained on vast amounts of public code, including a lot of insecure examples. You have to be the security expert, checking for common vulnerabilities like SQL injection or cross-site scripting.
Code Style and Readability: The AI doesn't care if your team uses tabs or spaces. You do. Part of your job is to enforce these standards, ensuring the code is maintainable for the humans who will have to look at it six months from now.
This is a form of human-AI pair programming, where the AI generates the first draft and you provide the crucial refinement and oversight.
The Care and Feeding of Gremlins: Documentation is King
Finally, remember that your AI gremlins have no long-term memory. They only know what you tell them in the moment. Without good documentation, they will start making assumptions about how the rest of your system works—and they will almost always be wrong.
But if you provide them with well-written documentation about your existing APIs, data structures, and coding conventions, they will use them. This is the ultimate incentive to finally write that documentation you've been putting off. Think of it as creating a user manual for your gremlin workforce. The better the manual, the better their work will be.
The New Reality
This is the deeper, more technical reality of being a vibe engineer. It’s a constant cycle of planning, testing, and refining. It requires a different set of skills: less about the line-by-line grind of coding and more about high-level architecture, critical thinking, and a healthy dose of skepticism.
We are, in a very real sense, the first generation of managers for a new kind of digital intelligence. It’s a strange, exhilarating, and often exhausting job. But make no mistake: this is the future of building things. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a pull request from a gremlin that needs a very, very close look.