[nachocoll]

Great post, and the "dark flow" framing really resonates — the productivity illusion described in the METR study alone should give every engineering team pause.

What strikes me reading this thread is how many of you have independently landed on the same conclusions: human accountability for generated code is non-negotiable, architecture has to drive generation (not the other way around), traceability matters, and you can't maintain what you don't understand.

These aren't just gut feelings — they're actually the core of something a few of us have been trying to formalize: the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org). It explicitly builds on top of the original Agile Manifesto to address exactly this environment.

The four values it proposes — accountability over anonymous generation, traceable intent over opaque implementation, discoverable domain structure over scattered code, and human-readable documentation over implicit knowledge — map directly to what experienced engineers in this thread are describing: staying deeply in the loop, reading the core code, and defining architectural boundaries before letting AI generate within them.

It doesn't reject AI-assisted coding. It tries to answer: what disciplines do Agile teams need so that AI-generated code doesn't become a liability? Worth a look if this resonates.