One day, you ask Cursor to change the color of a button. Next, your login system is broken, half your dependencies have vanished, and somehow you now have three different versions of React fighting in your node_modules like gladiators in a Roman coliseum. This is “vibe coding” with AI: You vibe, it vibes, and then everything dies.
If this sounds familiar, congratulations: you’ve tried using an AI coding assistant in 2025. Cursor, Windsurf, Copilot Chat — it doesn’t matter. Once the project becomes large enough, the model loses its focus. Like a dog chasing its tail, it edits one file, forgets another, and before you know it, your “tiny fix” has become a “clean install” situation. But here’s the twist: It’s not really the AI’s fault. It’s ours. Because we never gave it a proper to-do list.
The cult of vibe coding
Developers used to have two kinds of project management: Jira (the corporate gulag) and sticky notes (the anarchist commune). Vibe coding was supposed to be the third option: you just talked to your AI like a buddy at a hackathon.
“Hey Cursor, build me a dashboard with charts.” Cursor: Sure thing, boss!
Three minutes later: A dashboard, but also a completely new authentication system, a rogue CSS framework you didn’t ask for, and a mysterious file called temp-final-final2.js. It was fun at first. The AI felt like that overeager intern who wants to show initiative, but keeps reorganizing the filing cabinets mid-day. You forgive them because they mean well. But then you realize: this intern is going to delete production.
Enter task coding
So people got serious. Instead of vibes, they gave AI structure. The idea is beautifully boring: You make a PRD (Project Requirements Document) — basically, the ancient scroll of product management. Then you hand it to Cursor, not as a suggestion, but as gospel. And here’s the clever part: You don’t just say “build me an app.” You say: “Parse this PRD into discrete tasks, assign dependencies, track complexity, and only then touch my code.” Suddenly, the overeager intern becomes a junior dev who at least reads the checklist before rewriting your backend.
Meet Taskmaster: Jira, but fun (yes, really)
Taskmaster is the tool making this possible. Think of it as Jira for people who dislike Jira, or Trello if Trello could respond. You drop in your PRD, and it spits out a table of tasks with:
- Status: Done, not done, probably never done.
- Priority: Is this urgent, or can it wait for three sprints?
- Dependencies: Don’t build the roof before the walls.
- Complexity: Rated by a model that goes online, Google packages, and comes back with a difficulty score.
The cursor then works through these tasks step by step, updating them as it progresses. It’s like watching an AI run agile standups with itself. The AI finally has something it has always lacked: memory and boundaries.
Characters in this little play
- Marcy, the product manager: Thrilled, because now she can hand AI a PRD and feel like she’s still in charge.
- Devin, the senior developer: Skeptical, because every tool that “automates project management” usually automates the part where developers get blamed.
- Cursor, the AI: Earnest but clueless, happy to implement tasks so long as you spell them out like instructions in an IKEA manual.
Marcy: “Task 3 depends on Task 1, Cursor.” Cursor: Ah, dependencies. Got it. Building Task 2 now. Devin: “That wasn’t even — never mind.”
Why dependencies matter more than vibes
The hidden genius of Taskmaster isn’t the list itself; it’s the dependencies. Humans know not to build the login page before the database is set up. AI doesn’t. It’ll try anyway, and then you’ll spend a night untangling null pointer errors like Christmas lights. By telling Cursor: “Task B requires Task A,” you stop it from running off into the woods. And if a task is too big, Taskmaster breaks it into subtasks automatically. That’s how “build authentication” becomes “install Clerk,” “set up OAuth,” “connect frontend,” and so on. This is project management 101, but the revelation is that AI coding agents need it even more than humans do. They don’t improvise well; they hallucinate. Dependencies give them rails.
The culture shift: From vibes to chores
What’s fascinating isn’t just that this works — it’s how it changes the culture of coding with AI. Before, AI assistants were like improv partners: you’d riff, it would riff, and sometimes you’d get magic. But more often, you get spaghetti. Now, we’re moving toward treating AI like employees: They need onboarding, documentation, and structure.
The term “vibe coding” might not even survive. What we’re really doing is structured delegation. We’re not jamming with the AI; we’re managing it. Which means the real job isn’t coding anymore — it’s writing the PRD, defining tasks, and letting the AI implement them.
Humor in the machine
There’s something darkly funny about all this. For decades, developers begged managers to stop writing bad PRDs. Now developers are writing PRDs for machines. The PRD used to be a bureaucratic relic, created only because someone in management demanded it. Now it’s the most valuable artifact in AI coding. The thing you used to ignore in Confluence? Suddenly, it’s the spellbook that keeps your AI from summoning demons into app.js.
Making the invisible visible
What Taskmaster really does is make the invisible visible. Usually, when Cursor codes, you don’t see the chaos. It hallucinates, retries, and guesses until it spits out something that compiles. With Taskmaster, you see every task, its dependencies, and any failures. The AI becomes less of a black box and more of a clumsy coworker you can actually supervise. You can literally run the Taskmaster list and see its brain laid out in a table. It’s oddly comforting, like catching your Roomba’s internal log of “bumped into wall again.”
Why this matters beyond coding
Here’s the big picture: This isn’t just about developers. It’s about how we structure work in an age of AI. AI doesn’t fail because it’s lazy. It fails because it lacks process. Humans invented bureaucracy not just to torture each other, but because it works. When you give AI structure — PRDs, dependencies, rules — it suddenly performs like the worker you always hoped it could be. In other words, the future of AI productivity may look less like genius improvisation and more like… paperwork.
The ironic twist
The punchline is that the best way to make AI coding assistants useful is to treat them exactly like junior developers. Write a PRD, break down tasks, give them clear instructions, and track their progress. In other words, the robots came to automate us, and we responded by making them do our Jira tickets.
Devin, the senior developer, shrugs: “So now I spend my day writing PRDs instead of code. Cursor does the rest.” Marcy beams: “That’s project management, baby.” And Cursor, somewhere deep in its context window, is just happy to have a checklist.
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