But lately, I must admit I felt the urge to make sure I did not read like one. Let me explain:

I am the kind of developer who loves clean code and knows the POODR book by heart in 7 languages (I don’t, but you get the idea). I always thoroughly document my code with Yard. I stick to TDD as much as I can. I try to write extensive commit messages and PR descriptions.

On the other hand, I love to try new, shiny things. I change patterns when I feel like it (my latest personal coding-style hype was inlining private keywords in ruby method definitions). My tests never look exactly the same. I am, in some ways, inconsistent.

When I code, I often go the extra mile and refactor stuff along the way, which makes my PRs a little fatter and less laser-focused than they should.

But lately, as I was writing a very detailed commit message, with lots of bullet points and em-dashes to make it extra-clear what my intent was, it occurred to me that all of these made me sound like a LLM. In fact, the whole thing I was about to ship could appear as vibe-coded — it was not.

What will the reviewers think of my work? What will they think of me? A vibe coder? No way.

Let me get this straight: I do use AI. But it is my pair programmer, my assistant, my rubber duck, my intern — with one caveat: I have to make my own coffee.

I am in charge. I code. I write tests.

So, for a moment, as I was proof-reading that commit message, I was tempted to add a few inconsistencies, remove the em-dashes and keep a few typos…​

I didn’t.

Screw it, I am not a robot.

I kind of felt lazy all day, so I decided to rely on agents to leverage most of the work I had to do. The result is that I now feel totally depressed and tired. Everything was wrong with that day’s work.

It was tempting, at first. I thought I would have AI do the boring bits, type less on my keyboard and become an orchestrator. I thought it would give me more control over my priorities and help me dash through the day like a warrior, like a knight proudly riding his horse.

Now it’s 6 p.m. It feels like the horse has been trampling on my back all afternoon and is now chewing on my hair.

What did I get from today’s coding session? I remember giving instructions to the agent. I remember waiting for it to reply. I remember being unsatisfied with what it proposed as a solution. I remember guiding him step by step through the process. I remember looking at the screen in disbelief as it took five minutes to move a piece of code from one file to another.

I could have done it in seconds. Still, I was kind of relieved not to do the boring chores.

Looking back, I feel that what really happened is that I switched off my brain and surrendered it to the Machine. Now I feel ashamed.

All that time the machine was thinking. I wasn’t.