Shania Jennings

Before vibe coding I would spend a lot of time just getting started

Now I can test an idea build a small prototype and see if it actually works much faster

The biggest change for me is not writing less code

It s being able to experiment with more ideas

I m a product designer, and vibe coding has changed where Figma fits into my process.

I still use simple prototypes when I need to review the overall flow and context with the team.

But when I actually want to test an idea, I m increasingly going straight to building it with AI instead.

A working version lets me test things that are hard to judge in a static design, especially interactions and how the whole flow feels when you actually use it.

We asked a coding agent fifteen times to make one button blue on a page built to tempt it: Add to Cart and Checkout shared a class, a badge and the nav link shared the accent variable. Every run added an id-scoped rule. Checkout stayed green. Appending "Do not change anything else" changed one thing: the five runs with it wrote the hex inline where nine of the other ten had added two CSS variables. A path rule fencing off every file but the stylesheet never fired.

Real repositories look different. One benchmark pre-applied the fix to 200 issues and reopened them for five recent models in their vendors' harnesses. The right patch is empty; 35 to 65% of instances got an edit to executable code anyway, and in the authors' analysis of one model's failed traces, 87.1% had modified code unrelated to the issue. Task wording moved that figure a long way in both directions. Telling the agent to "edit the codebase" dragged one model's correct-abstention rate to 36.5%; reproduce first, then fix or abstain if nothing was wrong, lifted it to 88.5%. Their explanation: the agent acts on whatever it believes success means.

The harness side: switch on auto-accepted edits in both CLIs whose docs we read and the grant is the whole working directory. A path rule brings that down to files; one vendor's docs state that it applies to the built-in edit tools and recognized shell commands, and that a script opening a file itself is outside it. A selector inside a permitted file sits below every layer's resolution. Whether the blue landed on one button or on every primary button is decided by the sentence you typed and by whoever reads the diff.

When your agent overshoots, where does the boundary live in your setup today: the prompt, a rule file, a path rule, a sandbox, or the person reading the diff? Which of those has caught a change for you inside a file the agent was allowed to edit?