Five AI coding tools, five production incidents: a vibecoder's tool filter
techpotions · reddit · 2026-09-15
A developer who builds software with vibecoding for a living reviews five AI coding tools through the lens of real production incidents. His filter: tools must fit existing workflows, must not silently change logic, and must leave architectural decisions to humans — a rule born after an agent deleted a critical error boundary in a merged PR.
Key findings:
- Cursor: best for TypeScript teams in VS Code, but needs .cursorrules guardrails — it once misused unstablecache (3 hours of stale data) and generated a route bypassing permission middleware.
- GitHub Copilot: strong on polyglot codebases and greenfield scaffolding, but hallucinates APIs on legacy code and introduced subtle async bugs, including replacing error handling with a bare Promise.all and breaking Sentry alerts.
- Windsurf: holds context across 20 files, but auto-fixes types in unrelated packages — great on well-typed TypeScript, destabilizing on loosely typed code.
- Continue: on-prem with Ollama and good style alignment, but 1-3s latency was a dealbreaker.
- Aider: halved CRUD cycle time with human review, but introduced a race condition during legacy refactoring.
Devin, Amazon Q and Tabnine were cut on cost, lock-in and pricing. His takeaway: nothing is safe by default — two-person review on AI commits plus manual QA and snapshot tests have prevented more regressions than any lint rule.
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