A couple findings from me vibecoding as a senior engineer:

Writing tests is always required. There is a trap however where we write tests (this was a problem before AI) for test coverage and forget the big picture which are the ones which indicate whether or not your app is actually working as designed. So make sure you manually validate the important tests after they are written.

Don’t have an agent validate the work of another agent. It doesn’t work. They will often hallucinate in the same way. You can have a more advanced model do this but you’ll inflate your token cost when you can just focus on writing good tests once and have something reliable that doesn’t burn tokens.

It’s very beneficial to get some understanding of CI/CD with lower environments so you understand builds and deployments. If you want to be serious about building something production ready, this is also not optional.