Dunning-Kruger Driven Development

Dunning-Kruger Driven Development

Imagine a magic box.

A sleek, humming, inscrutable monolith that promises infinite possibility. You step up, whisper a request: a flying machine, something elegant, something that'll carry you wherever you want to go, no questions asked, and the box, obliging and eerily confident, spits out a gleaming craft. It hovers before you, weightless and waiting.

Would you board?

Would you, someone whose understanding of flight begins and ends with "airplanes have wings" and a vague recollection of it having something to do with someone named Bernoulli, step inside? The thing flies. It demonstrably works. That should be enough, right?

I'd like to think you'd hesitate. That something deep and mammalian would whisper: You have no idea what this thing is actually doing. And yet, every day, I watch people gleefully board metaphorical aircraft they conjured on a Cursor prompt.

People call it Vibe Coding, but I don't feel the vibes. I feel the flames.

I call it Dunning-Kruger Driven Development (DDD), the inevitable result of an industry where "it works" gets conflated with "it will last", or worse, "it is safe". Where the fundamental principles of software engineering, the slow, boring, hidden, tedious beams in the cathedral of functionality, get tossed in favor of immediate gratification.

At its core, Vibe Coding is confidence without comprehension. It's the perfect habitat for the Dunning-Kruger effect to thrive, reproduce, and raise little Dunning-Krugerlings. It is "move fast and break things" reimagined as a massive, blind elephant stampeding through a hospital and yelling "MVP!" while knocking over the radiology lab.

What gets lost in this chaos is the engineer. The real one. The one trained to see what isn't visible. The one who spends their time chasing the shadows behind the passing tests. The one who knows that "it runs" isn't the end of the story, it's the opening line of a much longer, darker chapter.

⸻

In a 2002 press briefing that, depending on your level of irony, either belongs in the annals of accidental profundity or printed on a novelty mug, then–U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced three categories of knowledge:

Say what you will about Rumsfeld (and you should, probably), but he inadvertently nailed the spiritual architecture of software engineering. Because if there's one place where the unknown unknowns flourish - thrive, blossom, metastasize - it's in the hot, humming jungle of production code.

Software doesn't just have failure modes. Software is a failure mode waiting to happen. And the most dangerous bugs aren't the ones that crash on launch. They're the ones that wait. The ones that pass tests. The ones that lurk in shadows, perfectly still, until some obscure sequence of inputs and lunar alignments causes the entire system to explode like a Shakespearean tragedy written in YAML.

To write code professionally is not just to write code. It's to live with the chronic, low-grade paranoia that somewhere in the machine — somewhere in this haunted forest of state and side effects and third-party SDKs — there is a trapdoor. And someday, someone will step on it.

And so we cope. We write tests. We refactor compulsively. We mutter to ourselves in comment threads. Not because we believe we got it right on the first try, but because we know we didn't. All good coding is driven by the anxiety born out of the knowledge that we don't know what we don't know. And compared to someone who is vibe coding, we know a lot more.

It takes an engineer, an actual, trained, experienced engineer, to go looking for trapdoors before anyone falls through them. Not someone who happened to be near the keyboard when the AI spat out something that passed CI.

⸻

The thing about the Hindenburg — about the inferno, the plunge, the iconic radioed agony ("Oh, the humanity!") — is that it wasn't caused by one singular, cinematic failure. Nobody forgot to tighten a bolt. There was no Final Destination moment. It was a tragic polyphony of overlooked details: flammable lacquer, slow hydrogen seep, ambient static. Nobody meant for the elements to align like that, but reality didn't care.

There's that old Murphy's Law chestnut: "Anything that can go wrong, will". But even Murphy assumed you knew the list of possible failures. In software, especially in vibe-coded software, the real horror is you don't. You deploy. You label it "Production." You cross your fingers. The crash isn't theoretical, it's calendrical. You just haven't gotten the invite yet.

You can ship something that feels perfect. The buttons click. The flows flow. The backend purrs. But if your understanding stops at "it works," then what you've built isn't software. It's a bomb with great UX.

And eventually, something will spark. Some edge case you didn't anticipate, some integration you didn't plan for, some system you didn't even know existed. And boom: not metaphorical fire, literal, reputational, existential fire.

The vibe coders —who are legion, and very active — will be shocked. But the people who understand systems? They're not surprised. They don't write code to avoid failure. They write code knowing failure is inevitable. That's not cynicism. That's craft. That's humility. The kind that whispers at 2 a.m., "You will never see all the ghosts in this machine". But you can leave behind a fire extinguisher. Maybe even a second one.

⸻

Let's zoom out. Not to trash AI, or to grumble from some imagined mountaintop of seniority muttering "back in my day we did it all in vi and spite," but to make a simple, urgent suggestion: maybe humility is the one technology we're not investing in nearly enough.

Because yes, AI is a tool. Like a hammer is a tool. But that analogy, seductive as it is, has a half-life. No one ever mistook themselves for an architect because they bought a hammer. Nobody strolled into a construction site, nailed two boards together, and started giving TED Talks on seismic resilience. But AI makes people feel like gods. Or at least like slightly hungover sorcerers with Jira tickets.

The danger isn't the tool. The danger is the illusion - the silky, seductive illusion - that competence has been automated. That because the scaffolding showed up when you hit enter, the building must be safe. That because it compiles, it's correct. This is how you get systems that look fine right up until the exact moment they collapse under their own weight and take your career - and maybe your company - with them.

We're not Luddites. We're not gatekeepers. We are professionals who have spent enough late nights staring at logs and praying to whatever minor deity handles Kubernetes to know that when unjustified confidence meets the unknown unknowns, things explode.

So no, "vibe coding" is not a methodology. It's not even a phase. It's a prelude. Sometimes to brilliance. More often to disaster.

And the point isn't to fear the tool. It's to fear the illusion of mastery. To recognize that wielding power without understanding is not just reckless - it's dangerous. Especially when that power is laying the foundations we all stand on.