You Don't Need Another Agent. You Need a Linter.

In my last post I complained — a lot — about product managers and how they made my life hell with vibe code. PS: apologies, manager, if you're reading this — but it's true. Now, I'm not here just to complain. There were a lot of learning opportunities too, like how to handle legacy / vibe code. Because at the end of the day, both are the same: no one knows how they work, but somehow they keep working. Touching them is like defusing a bomb — you never know how your change might cascade and break the core logic. The good news is that vibe code is much simpler than legacy. AI, in all its glory, tries to write perfect-looking code — proper function names, comments, the works — not like legacy code where a single function runs 500 lines, with spaghetti names all over that make no sense and comments that are out of date. And that makes it something I can actually handle. I still don't have a perfect, step-by-step playbook — but I've got pieces. The first one. The cheapest and the oldest one. The one the industry solved decades ago and the whole "AI built my app in a day" crowd somehow forgot exists. A linter. Yes, you heard me right. A linter. ESLint. Most people who've been in this industry already know it. It's the most boring, reliable tool in the box. But in an era where the answer to every problem is "add another AI," it's worth saying out loud why the boring tool still wins. What a linter actually is If you vibe-coded your way into this world, or you're new to web dev in general and have never heard the word "lint", here's the honest version. A linter is a set of rules you add to your repo. It reads your code without running it, checks it against those rules, and flags everything that's broken, sloppy, or about to bite you in production. The detail people get wrong: it's not a grep for bad words. A real linter parses your code into a syntax tree and actually reasons about its structure — what's imported, what's called, what's reachable, what types flow where. That's