YOLO Mode Only Works When YOLO Can't Hurt You
I’ve been calling it the bingo machine. You sit there watching the AI coding agent work. It stops. Asks permission. You hit allow. It stops again. Allow. Allow. Allow. You’re just pulling the lever waiting for the dopamine hit: the moment it finally says “done” and you can ship. Then you actually test it. And it’s not done. Not even close. Twelve months in I spent the last year fully immersed in AI coding tools. Not casually—daily. I rotate through all of them, keeping only a monthly subscription at a time so I can switch to whatever’s state of the art. Cursor. Claude Code. Codex. Back to Claude. ...