You’re cruising along, vibe-coding your way through a new feature, and—poof—the AI assistant goes dark. Maybe it hallucinated a library that doesn’t exist. Maybe it repeated the same wrong snippet ad nauseam. Welcome to the moment of reckoning: your blind faith in “make me the code” meets cold, hard compiler errors.

Spinning the wheel of madness: You tweak a comment here. You change “public” to “private” there. You pray to the Codegen Deity. You hope it understands your increasingly desperate prompts.

Lose an hour or a day: You still haven’t fixed the NullReferenceException, and your caffeine cold-brew is now room temperature.

Blame the tool that’ll fix it!: It’s obviously a bug in the AI, right? Right? RIGHT? Your sanity is going to ebb, beware the blaming of tools!

This cycle feels familiar because it is, the tooling is great at scaffolding code, less so at understanding your context. When it bails on you, you’ll need a plan B.

Continue reading “When the AI Ghost Vanishes” →