TL;DR
Define what to build—and more importantly what not to build. Keep the footprint tiny when vibe coding or the debugging nightmare starts.
Vibe Coding: The Fun Begins
With coding agents, you can build applications quickly and with minimal effort. All you need to do is prompt the agent. That’s the essence of vibe coding.
Here’s a real-life situation I experienced:
A smart product manager—great at product managing but lacking software engineering knowledge—used Claude to build a full web application. He simply prompted the agent to replicate an existing product and add a few features.
Then he came to me (the software engineer) and said:
“I’ve already built the app! Let’s release it ASAP. Can you just do a quick check for bugs before we launch?”
And that’s when the nightmare began: vibe debugging.
Enter the Vibe Debug Zone
The app came with outdated tooling (PostgreSQL 14, Python 3.9, Node 18), tokens in local storage, over-engineered architecture, mocked or broken features, no logging, and no indexes. Fixing it all would take 60+ hours, more than a month without a full-time engineer. A data scientist then asked Claude for more issues and the list exploded. Some items were non-critical, many were urgent, and the backlog was overwhelming. Agents trying to fix things introduced new bugs, left others, and the codebase became hard to reason about.
And so began the vicious cycle:
Build quickly with vibe coding, then debug endlessly; debugging leads to more debugging, and time slips away.
We wanted to launch fast, gather user feedback, and iterate. But the debugging delays blocked everything.
Taming the Vibe: Our Debugging Strategy
The core issue? Vibe coding enables rapid feature development—but the more features you build, the longer and messier the debugging becomes.
So we asked ourselves:
“Do we really need all these features in the first release?”
The answer was often no.
The original startup principle still applies: Build a minimal viable product (MVP), release quickly, gather feedback, and iterate.
Coding agents may tempt you into building more—but what matters most is building only what’s necessary.
Define a clear scope. Decide what not to build—more than what to build.
Recap & Lessons Learned
Before you start vibe coding, ask yourself:
What’s essential for launch? What can wait? Are we building more than we can debug?
There’s a tipping point where vibe coding turns from blessing to curse. As code complexity grows, so does debugging time.
Only build what’s truly needed to test your product’s core value. And always remember:
Simplicity is the fastest path to feedback.