A 2026 study found humans are quietly being gentler on AI-authored PRs than on human-authored ones. Single-reviewer review already broke at 400 lines per diff. The fix is two old ideas — distribute the review across the team, and pair every diff with a deterministic map of the code flow.

Brooks said adding people to a late project makes it later. Adding LLMs follows a similar pattern, except the cost lands on a different axis — output rises while shared understanding of the system erodes, and the resulting cognitive debt eventually has to be paid.

Apple's "do not hallucinate" prompt is funny. The same logic is why AI-written + AI-reviewed pipelines silently approve bugs, why long contexts compound errors, and why the real guardrails are deterministic.

Cursor, Kiro, Windsurf, Antigravity, Trae. All forks of VS Code, all wrapping one of three model APIs, all selling a long system prompt that does not move the model's ceiling. The vibe-coding tech-debt numbers were always pointing somewhere else.