How to avoid disaster when vibe-coding a billing engine — Andrew Garvin, Stripe
Andrew Garvin types one sentence asking for a billing engine that copies Lovable's pricing, and gets back a working sandbox: a customer, metered usage flowing in, and a draft invoice broken into separately scoped credit pools for builds, plan mode, cloud and gateway calls.
Reproducing that by hand means understanding auto recharge, credit expiry and overage, which is exactly where people hurt themselves. He cofounded Metronome, the usage billing platform Stripe acquired this year in its largest deal, so he has watched a lot of companies get this wrong. What makes the talk useful is that a billing vendor stands on stage and argues against full autonomy. Billing carries deep business logic and real money, so his recommendation is to let an agent accelerate you into a test environment and stop there, rather than ship to production unattended. The guardrails are unglamorous: portable skills files that carry the API's hard won context, and deliberately verbose error messages written so an agent can correct itself. He also separates three things people blur together, an agent as your product, as your buyer, and as your user.
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