In my ongoing efforts to understand the pros and cons of automagical coding bots, I have been vibe coding a WordPress plugin. I have no plans on uploading it to the repository (though I’ve tossed it up on GitHub) so stop clutching your pearls and take it for what it is: a learning exercise so I can write with a shred of authenticity and authority on the topic of generative code development.

Weak excuses for playing with AI aside, I’ve noticed something. 

See, I’ve been coding since grade school in the 1980s. A smarter version of me in some alternate timeline made a real career out of software development, but not this version. I do tech-adjacent work and writing, business analysis and information architecture. 

But I’ve done enough coding in my life besides to know that regression is a pretty normal part of code development: you make something work, test it, maybe even deploy it and move on… but then sometimes you come back later to write more code on the same project and end up breaking something that was already working. Regression.

The studious developer with a careful deployment and QA pipeline will catch most of these things and fix them before users notice.  That’s the process.

But vibe coding is meant to be quick and iterative and, hey, we lean into the bot to catch the flubs, right? Right? What’s that? We make more assumptions?

I mean I did. The first few versions of my plugin worked great. The feature list was much shorter but it did what it was initially meant to do.  But as often happens you think of tweaks and improvements and extra features and—I could do these things on my own but since this was a vibe coding experiment—I reach into Claude^[1] and ask “how can I add such and such a feature?” 

Claude happily obliges and gives me a long explanation with code snippets. I copy, paste, review. Wonderful, right?

My failing: I assumed Claude had my back.

Every time I wanted a new feature my prompt was a little too loose, my requirements were a little too flaky, my request to the algorithm was a little lacking: I got regression.

Oh, you mean you still wanted the other parts of your code to work, too? You didn’t explicitly ask for that… See, my vibe coding companion conveniently forgets or regresses ideas that my human brain assumed were core pieces of the thing we built together. That’s a problem.

Maybe I’m just a naive software guy working on a low stakes project as a learning exercise and none of this matters. Or maybe there’s a gaping trust hole in using the kind of system that pretends to be an expert but has a memory as impermeable as Swiss cheese.