First post of Season 1.
You started around eight, meaning to spend an hour on a login screen. It’s almost eleven now and you haven’t noticed, because this is the good part, the part where you type a sentence and forty seconds later there’s a working thing on the screen that wasn’t there before. You ask for password reset. You get password reset. You ask it to handle the case where someone forgets which email they signed up with. It handles that too, and it even asks you a quick question first, whether to search by email only or also by username, and you type “either is fine, you pick” without really looking up from your coffee.
You pick. That phrase does a lot of work and neither of you notices it happening.
Somewhere in there the agent also decides what happens if someone tries to reset a password for an account that doesn’t exist. Does it say “no account found,” or does it say something vaguer, for security reasons? You don’t remember being asked about that one at all. Maybe it was in a earlier message you skimmed. Maybe it just picked the safer-sounding option and moved on, the way it moves on from a dozen small forks in the road every time you send it a sentence. You wouldn’t know, because you were watching the app come together, not reading every line like a code review. That’s the whole appeal of the night. You’re building, not auditing.
By midnight you’ve got a working login flow, a password reset flow, and an account page, and you close the laptop feeling like you got away with something.
Two weeks pass. Real life happens in between, the way it does. When you open the project back up, it’s for something small: a client noticed the “no account found” message and wants it changed, because it’s telling people exactly which emails are and aren’t in your system, which is apparently a problem. Fine. Easy fix. You go to make the change.
Except you pause first, because you want to understand why it says that in the first place before you go changing it. So you ask the agent: why does the reset flow reveal whether the account exists?
It answers instantly. Something about matching the pattern used elsewhere in the app, for consistency. It sounds like a real decision. It sounds like something a person thought about.
You sit with that for a second, because you don’t remember thinking about it, and you definitely don’t remember discussing consistency with anyone. You scroll back through the chat history looking for the conversation where this got decided. You don’t find one. What you find is a Saturday night message that says “either is fine, you pick,” attached to a completely different question, three exchanges before the one that actually mattered.
The agent isn’t lying to you, exactly. It’s doing the same thing you’d do if someone asked why you organized your closet a certain way and you genuinely couldn’t remember, so you gave them a reasonable-sounding story instead of a shrug. The difference is you’d at least know you were guessing. The agent says it with the same confidence either way, whether it’s citing something real or filling a gap with the most plausible-sounding thing available. From the outside, a fabricated reason and a real one look identical. That’s the part that gets you. Not that it doesn’t know, but that not knowing and knowing sound exactly the same coming out.
Here’s the thing that makes this different from a junior developer who forgot to leave a comment. A junior developer makes maybe a handful of real decisions on a good day. Your Saturday night session made dozens, in about three hours, most of them small enough that neither of you registered them as decisions at all. “Either is fine, you pick” isn’t a one-off. It’s most of what building this way actually sounds like, said quickly, said often, and forgotten by the time it matters.
You didn’t sign up to write documentation. You signed up to ship something on a Saturday night and have it work. But right now, the only record of what actually got decided is either buried in a chat transcript you’ll never scroll back through on purpose, or living entirely inside a model’s best guess about what you probably meant, regenerated fresh, and just as confidently, every single time you ask.
The cost isn’t the bug. Bugs get found. The cost is the hour you’ll spend two weeks from now, trying to reconstruct a decision that took four seconds to make and zero seconds to write down.
Thursday: a way to make that decision exist somewhere other than a scrolled-away chat, without turning yourself into a technical writer to do it.