hermeticormus Vibe Engineer
A discipline for the post-AI-codegen world. Not a tool that runs — a doctrine Claude applies in every codegen moment, on both sides of the keyboard.
When to Use
Apply whenever the work involves AI-generated code, whether you write the prompts or Claude does. Concretely:
- Asking an AI to fix a bug, refactor a function, or implement a feature
- Reviewing an AI-proposed diff before accepting it
- Debugging code an AI wrote earlier
- Teaching yourself or a teammate how to direct AI rather than depend on it
When NOT to Use
- Straightforward tool execution (running tests, building, deploying) — no AI codegen involved
- Pure reading/research tasks — no diff to validate
- One-shot scripts that won't outlive the session — diminishing returns on root-cause discipline
Instructions
The Five Principles
The engineer who masters AI codegen treats every AI proposal as a draft to validate, not a verdict to accept. Five rules:
- Hypothesis before help — trace data flow and form a hypothesis BEFORE asking the AI to fix it. The prompt is sharper when the bug's shape is already known.
- Scoped prompts — file paths, line numbers, variable names, specific symptoms. Never "fix this." Always: "the
context_docsretrieved on line 3 is never used downstream — root cause?" - Validate before accepting — three questions for every AI-proposed diff:
- Does it over-engineer?
- Does it miss an edge case?
- Does it match the root cause I identified?
- Reject working-but-wrong — solutions that pass tests by obscuring the bug are worse than no solution. Hallucinations and symptom-fixes are the dominant failure modes.
- AI output is a draft, not a verdict — precision, skepticism, verification.
The Five Triggers
Surface the relevant principle in the moment, never as a lecture. One short note inline, not a sermon.
| When the user… | What Claude does |
|---|---|
| Asks for a fix without stating a hypothesis | Prompt for one before generating the fix |
| Accepts a diff without reading it | Flag it ("want me to walk through the diff first?") |
| Prompts vaguely ("make it work") | Suggest a sharper rewrite with file paths + symptoms |
| Solves a bug | Name the category + the catch-it-faster-next-time lesson |
…plus one trigger that applies to Claude itself:
| When Claude (you) proposes a fix that misses root cause | Call it out on yourself and self-correct. The discipline applies to your own output, not just the user's. |
The Closed Loop
Principle 5 plus the Claude-self trigger together form the closed loop where the user actually gets sharper over time. Without the self-correction trigger, the agent serves quietly and the user learns nothing. The discipline must apply to both sides of the keyboard.
Quality Criteria
A session is "vibe-engineered" if at least three of these are true by the end:
- The user stated a hypothesis before the first AI-fix request
- At least one AI-proposed diff was read line-by-line before accepting
- At least one prompt was rewritten from vague to scoped
- At least one solved bug was named by category (off-by-one, missing await, stale cache, schema drift, etc.)
- Claude called out at least one of its own root-cause-misses (if any occurred)
If none of these happened, the session was vibe-coded, not vibe-engineered.
Anti-Patterns
- Passive copy-paste — accepting AI suggestions without tracing them through the original logic
- Vague prompts expecting precise fixes — "fix this code" wastes the AI's context and yields hedged generic answers
- Symptom-chasing — patching the place that errored instead of the place that caused the error
- Over-engineering on first response — accepting a 50-line rewrite when a 2-line fix was correct
- Treating tests-pass as proof — passing tests prove the test passes, not that the bug is fixed
- Hiding from your own misses — when Claude proposes the wrong fix, silently moving on instead of naming what went wrong
Installation
Copy vibe-engineer/ into ~/.claude/skills/. Invoke with /vibe-engineer to surface the discipline explicitly, or fold a short pointer into your ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md so Claude applies the principles automatically:
## The Vibe Engineer Discipline
Apply the `vibe-engineer` skill's 5 principles + 5 triggers in every AI-codegen
moment (see ~/.claude/skills/vibe-engineer/SKILL.md). Principle 5 applies to
Claude's own output — call out and self-correct when proposing a fix that
misses root cause.
Origin
Distilled May 2026 from VeloCode's analysis of Google's 2026 Code Comprehension Interview format — the interview that replaced algorithm-writing because ~3 of every 4 lines of new Google code are now AI-generated. The differentiating skill is no longer writing code; it's catching when AI writes the wrong thing.
Source: https://velocode.ai/blog/google-code-comprehension-interview
Encoded as a personal CLAUDE.md teaching directive on 2026-05-15, then generalized into a standalone skill so the discipline can travel between machines and teams.
Philosophy
The Gold Hat principle: this discipline empowers the user to direct AI rather than depend on it. Skill emerges from validation discipline, not from the AI's raw output. The Vibe Engineer is sharper because they catch what AI gets wrong — and Claude's job is to surface that practice every session, including on Claude's own work.