The folks who are successful at “vibe coding” with LLMs aren’t doing it blind, they’re drawing on years of experience spotting subtle bugs, knowing what to ignore, and when to take the wheel. That kind of intuition doesn’t come for free.

But there is a path forward for juniors trying to make this stuff work.

The key is adopting habits from more experienced engineers, starting with writing tests before building your next feature. When seniors code, they’re constantly anchoring themselves with test coverage so they don’t accidentally break something that was working 20 minutes ago.

That’s the real trap of vibe coding: if you don’t approach it methodically and with discipline, you’ll eventually regress your own progress. You’ll fix one thing and unknowingly nuke three others. And you won’t realize until it’s too late.

Every experienced engineer has lived through this. That’s how they learned to stop, test, and verify. Juniors can skip a lot of that pain by learning to test early, test often, and treat working code like something fragile, not a blank slate.

AI can be an amazing accelerator, but only if you build guardrails first.