On March 5th, Amazon’s North American marketplaces went down. 6.3 million orders lost.
Amazon engineer: “People are becoming so reliant on AI that essentially they stop reviewing the code altogether.”
Connect the dots?
Everyone’s vibe coding now.
Prompt in. ➡️ Code out. ➡️ Ship it. ➡️ Next feature.
And honestly? For getting something working fast, it’s remarkable. Cursor, Claude, Copilot — the tools are genuinely good.
A working prototype in an afternoon isn’t hype anymore… it’s Tuesday.
But here’s what’s also happening:
Engineers are shipping code they can’t read …
Fixing errors they can’t interpret …
Building systems they fundamentally don’t understand …
… and only discovering that when something breaks in production.
Vibe coding doesn’t give you intuition. It borrows someone else’s.
Short-Term: that’s fine when everything works. It’s a crisis when it doesn’t.
The picture is much worse Long-Term:
Every shortcut you don’t question is a muscle you stop using.
A year from now, you’ve shipped a lot — but you know less than when you started.
The engineers who actually thrive with these tools? They never stop asking why.
- They read the code.
- They rewrite pieces by hand just to make sure they still can.
- They vibe code, while learning & staying sharp.
- All. The. Time.
And they know when the AI is wrong. They can feel it.
That’s the gap vibe coding can’t close for you.
Use the tools. Ship fast.
But spend at least 20% of your time going one level deeper — why did that model choice make sense?
What is that API call actually doing?
How would you rebuild this if the AI wasn’t there?
That’s not extra work… that’s the work.
As promised, value in under a minute.
Stay sharp,
Kirill
P.S. You DON’T need to review every line of the generated code. But you DO need to understand what each section of the code is doing and why it’s there.
The engineers who scare me aren’t the ones who can’t code. They’re the ones who can ship anything and explain nothing.