The more I use AI and AI agents like Claude Code, ChatGPT, and JetBrains’s Junie, the more I am struck by the lack of a modern vocabulary to describe what working with these tools is like. A few new terms have entered the programmer’s lexicon of late, most notably “prompt injection” courtesy of Simon Willison, “slop” to refer to unwanted AI-generated content, and “vibe coding” coined by Andrej Karpathy this February.

But where is the term to describe how I feel when using AI agents such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Junie?

AI Flat Spin Image of a Plane

Because on the one hand, I feel almost like a fighter pilot when things are going well: afterburners blazing, I blast through coding issues at a speed that is incredible. Everything is great.

But then, just as quickly, the AI model can become confused or just wildly hallucinate an answer. If I’m not carefully monitoring what’s happening, my projects and codebase can quickly become a mess of spaghetti code.

At the moment, I feel a mixture of excitement, dread, and helplessness as I wait for an AI agent to respond, unsure whether it will lead to great code generation or an AI-induced nightmare.

And this must feel something like a flat spin for a pilot. One moment you are racing around feeling invincible, and the next you are in a helpless and potentially fatal spin.

I’m not a pilot myself, but my favorite movie of all time is Top Gun, and that is likely where the metaphor came from in my head. In the film, Maverick and Goose, two fighter pilots, end up in a flat spin that ultimately kills one of them. It is tragic and abrupt, as they were fine just seconds before.