Don't Trust the Fluent Report The first time my pipeline embarrassed me, the report looked perfect. It was a weekly competitive brief: five pages, clean structure, confident prose, a chart caption, three bulleted takeaways. I skimmed it, thought this is good , and almost shipped it. Then I clicked through to one of the sources it cited, and the number wasn't there. Not misquoted. Not paraphrased. Invented. The report had pulled a statistic out of thin air and dressed it in a citation to make it look load-bearing. That's the specific failure mode of generated reports, and it's worse than a typo. A typo you catch. A fluent, well-structured, confidently-cited claim slips past you, because the prose is doing its job: it reads like something a competent analyst wrote. Your eyes relax. You rubber-stamp it. And at scale, fifty reports a week, a hundred, eyeballing isn't a validation strategy. It's a prayer. Why the obvious checks don't catch this The first t...
Stop Vibe Coding. Start Budgeting. For a while my favorite way to use a coding agent was to paste in a giant file, type "make this better," and accept whatever came back. It felt like superpowers. The agent would refactor, rename, restructure, and I'd nod along, merge it, and move on. A week later I'd open the same file and not recognize it. I hadn't written it. I hadn't even read it carefully. I'd vibes-coded it: given in to the feeling of progress and forgotten to actually understand the code. And when something broke, I was debugging text I'd never truly read. That's the trap of vibe coding, and it has two costs people don't count. The obvious one is that you ship code you can't explain or fix. The less obvious one, the one I want to talk about, is that it's expensive . Not just in money. In the one resource the agent actually runs on: its context window. The agent is a budget, not a magic box Here's the mental model that c...