Bah. I just lost all of the work that I did yesterday.
I’ve been using a new text editor over the past few months, which I “vibe-coded” for myself using AI. I never really reviewed its code, and it’s worked fairly well so far. Yes, it is vibe-coded in the full sense of the word, and now the bill has come due.
Today, a weird race-condition bug in the editor caused an open file to get deleted (along with my work).
This is a bitter lesson, but one that’s useful (even though the data loss really hurts). AI is ultimately a tool, and it’ll write what I tell it to write, and won’t write what I don’t tell it to write. There’s no point in blaming tools.
It’s tempting to feel like “I wouldn’t have written such an inconsistent system”. But it was my responsibility to get the AI to write test cases related to data reliability (and then for me to review those test case implementations thoroughly), and I didn’t do that.
I’m obviously going to continue using my custom text editor (it solves an important problem for me), but this event is a useful reminder to make sure that the critical aspects of a system are provable (via tests) when using AI to build stuff. For e.g. data reliability in this case, probably something else in another project.