Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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You can now easily generate files in Gemini.

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Move from a brainstorm to a polished document, sheet or PDF with a single prompt in Gemini.
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alvinashcraft
58 minutes ago
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Pennsylvania, USA
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Microsoft is giving its Xbox employees an Xbox email address

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The Microsoft Xbox game logo against a green and black background.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma wants everyone to know: "We are Xbox." Just last week, she scrapped Microsoft Gaming as the name of Microsoft's gaming division in favor of simply Xbox. Now, to reinforce that message, sources at Xbox tell me that all Xbox employees are getting an @xbox.com email address next month.

The new Xbox email address will replace an existing @microsoft.com address as the default way to send new emails, and employees will be able to opt-out and keep their Microsoft email address as the default send-from address instead. Mojang employees will also be given an @mojang.com email address, and both Xbox and Mojang employees will stil …

Read the full story at The Verge.

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alvinashcraft
59 minutes ago
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Pennsylvania, USA
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AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: How HSO Is Embedding AI Agents into Core Business Operations

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HSO explains how embedding AI agents into ERP and business workflows is accelerating implementations, improving data transformation, and driving real user adoption through industry-specific automation.

The post AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: How HSO Is Embedding AI Agents into Core Business Operations appeared first on Cloud Wars.

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alvinashcraft
59 minutes ago
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AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Dona Sarkar of Microsoft on Why AI Won’t Replace You—But AI Power Users Will

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Dona Sarkar explains why AI should be viewed as a tool for empowerment rather than job replacement, urging professionals to become “AI power users” who learn how to harness AI within their own roles and industries.

The post AI Agent & Copilot Podcast: Dona Sarkar of Microsoft on Why AI Won’t Replace You—But AI Power Users Will appeared first on Cloud Wars.

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alvinashcraft
1 hour ago
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How Trump Weaponized the DOJ Division That Kept Elections Fair

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The Trump administration has effectively forced out more than two dozen experienced lawyers from the DOJ's Voting Section, the part of the agency responsible for upholding the Voting Rights Act.
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alvinashcraft
1 hour ago
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A Non-Engineer Look at Vibe Coding Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

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By 2026, I don’t need to tell you vibe coding is useful, you’ve probably already tried it. Still, thinking about it as a way of thinking that will solve all of your problems is probably a bit too optimistic.

It’s easy to get carried away while you’re typing prompts, but there are several real challenges with vibe coding that you need to think about. It almost always works until it doesn’t work anymore.

Where vibes are immaculate

From a personal (and business) standpoint, vibe coding at the start of a project is probably its best use. Since I feel a personal example is better than three abstract claims, I’ll share my own.

Throughout my career, I often got overwhelmed by tasks and had troubles organizing them in a way that my brain likes. Projects, writing, editing, sending interview questions and getting them back, for example. None of these are big tasks on their own but they’re very different in nature.

Finding a good task manager app was next to impossible, but I have managed to create a simple dashboard web app that has all the things I need and nothing more.

For many, my AI tool might be useless, but for me it’s the only one that works precisely the way my brain does.

The appeal is real, and undeniable. Because you know best what you want, getting AI to do it is just a matter of sending messages and tailoring the “thing” into whatever you’d like. For me it was a real solution for a problem I face every day, but for someone else it might be a prototype of a new app or service that went from brain to screen in three hours.

Where the vibes get bad

The problems start when vibe coding moves into production, and I’ve seen that with my eyes as well. While we all know what things should look like for the end user, most of us from non-technical fields do not have any idea what’s happening under the hood. That’s why you need to think about more than just vibes.

Code you don’t understand is code you can’t maintain. Easy enough; if you create a beast of a tool, app, or an entire service you intend to share with others, it’s very tricky to maintain it if you know nothing about it.

For example, it’s fine to create a massive SaaS solution you would use since you can troubleshoot issues with AI in your own time; there’s no real risk. But if you’re shipping the service to others, what happens if something breaks at 3 am for someone who paid for that service?

Security gaps stack up. Every security expert will tell you that nobody cares about security until something goes wrong. With vibe coding and AI, the “wrong” part can be built-in during the creation of the tools. AI sometimes just embeds API keys or other secret info in the code, doesn’t sanitize the code properly, and leaves a lot of open doors in general. If you’re not savvy and don’t think about this, you’re going to have a bad time. Also, remember that hackers also use AI to find weaknesses.

The DORA AI report shows what we’re all thinking. The 2024 DORA report found that AI adoption actually correlated with a 7.2% reduction in delivery stability. More telling: 39% of respondents said they had little to no trust in AI-generated code, yet nearly everyone was using it anyway.

The risk here is over-reliance on AI tools that leave you, their creator, sitting on the sidelines wondering what’s even going on.

Keep an eye out for over-vibing

In my experience, there are a few signals that you are perhaps in too deep into vibe coding, and it’s starting to become a liability. I’m not saying you should go and seek professional help, but for some of these help is really the only solution.

  • You can’t explain what the code does, only what you asked the tool to make. If you try to explain it to a real engineer, the conversation is short and unpleasant for both sides.
  • You’re using AI to explain code that AI wrote, which makes the explanation wrong as well.
  • You’ve stopped writing tests because “AI will catch it”. And AI is, of course, not catching it for some reason.
  • You’re patching AI patches. The original AI solution had a bug, you asked AI to fix it, that fix introduced another issue, and now you’re three layers deep.

I know that asking a senior engineer to help you fix your vibe coded app might be one of the more stressful experiences in your life, but if you’re set to be a vibe coder, that’s a chance you’ve got to take.

I’m not trying to ruin your vibe, but…

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that you should lose Claude Code and start typing everything manually (or by pasting from StackOverflow).

What I’m saying is that the ones who make the most out of vibe coding apps are the ones who could, theoretically, make the same apps themselves.

What I’ve found in the last month is that AI adoption and tendency to vibe code things is a pendulum: you either think it’s bad, complex and don’t want to touch it, and once you do start you can’t get enough of it. I’ve heard comparisons with “prime Call of Duty”, which is a reference only gamers would understand, but paints the picture.

A good vibe coding experience is like driving a convertible on a coastal road at sunset.

In 2026, people are exceptionally interested in making anything with Claude Code and other tools and the truth is that we don’t really need 90% of those.

So when vibing, I’d advise you to think small, and think about problems that you have. It’s ok to create a task management tool for you, and not to make money on, and it’s okay to vibe code a prototype of a new idea before presenting it.

I’d just like you to make sure to understand that using a tool mainly used by software engineers does NOT make you one, and you need to spend a lot of time understanding what the tool built in order to get close to the “real world.”

FAQ:

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding is a development approach where you describe what you want in natural language and let AI generate the code. It’s fast and easy, but works best when the person in charge knows what good code looks like.

What are the biggest risks of vibe coding?

The main risks are shipping code you don’t understand, accumulating security gaps from unvalidated outputs, and losing the ability to debug or maintain what you’ve built.

Is vibe coding bad for production?

Not by itself, but it carries risks in production environments. These are around security, maintainability, and code that can’t be explained without AI.

Can non-developers use vibe coding to build apps?

Yes, but with limits. Personal tools and prototypes are fair game. Anything you ship to paying users needs someone who can own the code and knows how to fix it.

Does AI-generated code affect software delivery?

According to the 2024 DORA report, AI adoption correlated with a 7.2% reduction in delivery stability, suggesting that bigger productivity on paper doesn’t mean better software.

The post A Non-Engineer Look at Vibe Coding Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them) appeared first on ShiftMag.

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alvinashcraft
1 hour ago
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