Agent Responsibly
3 Apr 2026 via vercel.com
How to multiply your shipping cadence while using agents responsibly. Matthew Binshtok on the Vercel blog:
There is a fundamental difference between relying on AI and leveraging it.
- Relying means assuming that if the agent wrote it and the tests pass, it’s ready to ship. The author never builds a mental model of the change. The result is massive PRs full of hidden assumptions that are impossible to review because neither the author nor the reviewer has a clear picture of what the code actually does.
- Leveraging means using agents to iterate quickly while maintaining complete ownership of the output. You know exactly how the code behaves under load. You understand the associated risks. You’re comfortable owning them.
I’ve seen a lot of strong opinions about disclosing whether code in a PR was written by hand or generated by AI. I don’t really care. The author owns the code in the first place. The author and reviewer have a shared responsibility for what happens on production.
Putting your name on a pull request means “I have read this and I understand what it does.” If you have to re-read your own PR to explain how it might impact production, the engineering process has failed.
The litmus test is simple: would you be comfortable owning a production incident tied to this pull request?