I have a confession to make: I am not a robot.
But lately, I must admit I felt the urge to make sure I did not read like one. Let me explain:
I am the kind of developer who loves clean code and knows the POODR book by heart in 7 languages (I don’t, but you get the idea). I always thoroughly document my code with Yard. I stick to TDD as much as I can. I try to write extensive commit messages and PR descriptions.
On the other hand, I love to try new, shiny things. I change patterns when I feel like it (my latest personal coding-style hype was inlining private keywords in ruby method definitions). My tests never look exactly the same. I am, in some ways, inconsistent.
When I code, I often go the extra mile and refactor stuff along the way, which makes my PRs a little fatter and less laser-focused than they should.
But lately, as I was writing a very detailed commit message, with lots of bullet points and em-dashes to make it extra-clear what my intent was, it occurred to me that all of these made me sound like a LLM. In fact, the whole thing I was about to ship could appear as vibe-coded — it was not.
What will the reviewers think of my work? What will they think of me? A vibe coder? No way.
Let me get this straight: I do use AI. But it is my pair programmer, my assistant, my rubber duck, my intern — with one caveat: I have to make my own coffee.
I am in charge. I code. I write tests.
So, for a moment, as I was proof-reading that commit message, I was tempted to add a few inconsistencies, remove the em-dashes and keep a few typos…
I didn’t.
Screw it, I am not a robot.