The hype says anyone can code now. The reality: vibe coding changes *what* senior engineers do, not *whether* we're needed. And the gap between experienced and inexperienced developers is getting wider, not narrower. Collins Dictionary named “vibe coding” their Word of the Year for 2025. Search interest spiked over 6,000%. The narrative is seductive: describe what you want, AI writes the code, programming becomes as easy as having a conversation.
I wrote a daemon to listen to Claude Code hooks. My first version read `$CLAUDE_HOOK_PAYLOAD` and logged empty bodies for two days straight. The payload was sitting on stdin the whole time. This post is the five gotchas I hit while wiring up ClaudeDeck — a Stream Deck plugin (a small program that runs inside Elgato’s Stream Deck app on the USB grid of programmable LCD keys) that talks to Claude Code over its hooks system. Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal CLI for Claude — claude in your shell — and its hooks are user-defined scripts it spawns at certain points in a session (before a tool call, on session start, on prompt submit). My daemon is a long-running background process the plugin and the hooks both talk to over a local socket. None of the gotchas are exotic. All of them cost me hours. Each one is a place where the docs were either silent, ambiguous, or contradicted by tribal knowledge I picked up from other people’s projects.
I rebuilt my portfolio site in a weekend using vibe coding with Claude Code . This is the real workflow — no hype, with honest tradeoffs. Andrej Karpathy coined “vibe coding” in early 2025. The pitch: describe what you want in natural language, let the AI write the code, spend your time directing instead of typing. Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year. Most takes on it are either breathless hype or dismissive eye-rolls. Here’s what it looks like when a senior engineer uses it for a real project.
The AI coding tool landscape in 2026 has finally settled into four serious players: Claude Code , Cursor , GitHub Copilot , and Windsurf . I've used all four on real work. This is the honest comparison. Forget feature checklists. What matters is how each tool feels under real engineering work — the kind I do every day as a senior software engineer at Meta. I built this site primarily with Claude Code, but I’ve put serious hours into the others.
Boris Cherny created Claude Code. When he shared how he actually uses it day-to-day, the setup was surprisingly simple. I went through every tip, tried most of them, and have opinions about all of them. The original thread is on Boris’s X account. A good companion site is howborisusesclaudecode.com which compiles everything in one place.