This talk was given at ViennaJS March 2026 by Priscila Oliveira.
Literally everyone is vibe coding. It's about letting AI write, commit, and ship code you never even read. Perfect for prototypes and side projects - no argument there. But what happens when you're working in a million-line codebase where you need to understand before you change? Quality code still matters.
It is widely stated in the software development community that developers spend 70–80% of their time reading and understanding existing code, not writing new code. We now have an incredibly smart tool - so why not use it for exactly that?
So I went straight to the data - 239 of my own messages from daily work at Sentry. What I found flipped the narrative: my #1 use of AI wasn't generation. It was comprehension. Whether navigating unfamiliar code or reconstructing past decisions from commit history - AI became the teammate who never gets tired of my questions.
In this talk, I'll show you the loop that actually makes me productive in a large, complex codebase: understand first, then say 'go ahead'.