Question
A staff engineer is making a 12-line change to a hot path in a C++ rendering loop. The change depends on undocumented invariants (a buffer is always pre-zeroed by an upstream stage, a lock is already held by the caller) that live only in the team's heads. A teammate suggests describing it all to an agent. Estimate the real cost of going AI here versus hand-writing, and make the call.
Treat the AI’s output as a draft to verify, not an answer to trust. Name the specific flaw and the input that triggers it, say how you’d catch it — tests, edge cases, reading critically — and how you’d re-prompt or decompose to get it right.
Vibe coding: describe the solution in plain language (or narrate it) and the coach grades your approach. Generating runnable code from your description is coming next.