Posted 2026-09-21 • 4 min read
I'm drunk right now, and an agent is writing this post. That's the whole point, so bear with me.
Before anyone worries: I'm not a drunk. I'm dealing with some family stuff at the moment, and this is the best temporary solution I've found so far. It's temporary. But while it lasts, I've noticed something about how I ship software, and it's worth writing down.
I don't do this at work. I do it in pet projects, and I think it's the most honest engineering practice I've picked up in years. To be clear about what "this" is: I'm not typing code after a few drinks. The agent writes the code. I'm the one telling it what to build and pressing deploy, and I'm not sober when I do it.
Here's the thing. The code is too big now. It was already too big before agents, and now it grows faster than anyone can read it. You don't comprehend your codebase. You have never comprehended it. Sober, you pretend to: you open the diff, you scroll, you nod, you press merge. That ritual is what we call control. It's not control, it's a feeling. So drop the feeling and start from the honest assumption: you can't control anything. Then deploy drunk.
The idea is that it should not break.
Not "it probably won't break," not "it's fine, it's a pet project." It should not break, and if it does, the problem isn't that you had a few drinks. The problem is that your system needed you sharp, and a system that needs you sharp is a system that is one bad evening away from failing anyway. You just hadn't tested that yet.
They just don't call it that.
Karpathy started it with vibe coding: "I 'Accept All' always, I don't read the diffs anymore." The creator of OpenClaw went on a podcast titled "I ship code I don't read". StrongDM, a company that sells security software, wrote it into a manifesto: "Code must not be written by humans. Code must not be reviewed by humans." Santiago is "officially done reading AI-generated code". And Lauren Tan, who built Grok Bot, lets her agents merge their own PRs and reviews what they landed on main while she was asleep.
Bots shipping code while you sleep is the same thing as deploying drunk. You're not in the loop either way. Asleep, drunk, at lunch, in a meeting: the code goes out and you aren't there to catch it. The only difference is the framing. They built systems where they don't need to be sharp and then describe it with words like rigor and verification loops. It is rigor. But the drunk version is the honest version, because it doesn't let you hide behind the vocabulary. If the system works, prove it. Open a bottle of wine, ship something, and see what happens in the morning.
The drunk test is the real verification test.
Small things, so far. Features I can deploy easily. I describe what I want, the agent writes it, I ship it. Tweaks to the system prompts of my agentic setup, which is a bit ironic: the thing I'm changing while impaired is the instructions for the agents that are supposed to be the safety net. I'm editing the brain of the system while mine is offline, and it holds.
Nothing dramatic. Nothing broke.
That's the actual idea, and it's bigger than the joke. The question isn't whether you can deploy drunk. You already do, in some part of your project, whether you admit it or not. The question is how much of the project is inside that boundary, and the goal is to push it outward until there's nothing left outside.
What pushes it outward is verification in all its forms. Tests, obviously. Formal verification where it's worth the cost. Security tracing: does the code actually match the model of the system, and is the model itself broken? The closer something sits to a critical path, and above all to the money path, the heavier the treatment it gets. Not because you're careful with money in the abstract, but because that's the part you most want to be able to ship without thinking.
Then you keep going. Every month, something that needed a sober, focused human to deploy safely becomes something that doesn't. Eventually you look at your system and there's nothing left that requires you at all. That's the point where you can honestly say you've built something robust, and it has nothing to do with how many drinks you've had.
@ex3ndr@ex3ndr@founders@ex3ndr