“No Vibe Coding While I’m On Call”: What Happens When AI Writes Your Production Code

AI code generation without proper guardrails leads to production incidents. Through a fictional narrative of a company experiencing repeated outages from AI-generated code, the article illustrates four critical failure patterns: AI optimizing code without understanding system context, generating tests that pass but don't validate requirements, documenting features that don't exist, and eroding architectural resilience through incremental changes. The solution involves breaking AI tasks into small verifiable chunks, using AI to critique its own work, verifying documentation against actual code, establishing architectural reviews, and building observability from day one.