Vibe Coding Pitfalls: When Fast Feels Good But Breaks Bad

We've all been there. The deadline is looming, the coffee is flowing, and your fingers are flying across the keyboard. You're in the zone, shipping features at breakneck speed. This is what the startup world celebrates as "vibe coding" - that magical state where you're just vibing with the code, making things happen without overthinking it.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: vibe coding is a double-edged sword that can slice through your codebase faster than you can say "technical debt."

What Is Vibe Coding?

Vibe coding emerged from startup culture's obsession with speed and the "move fast and break things" mentality. It's characterized by:

• Prioritizing shipping over planning
• Writing code based on intuition rather than design
• Skipping tests "just this once" (which becomes always)
• Copy-pasting solutions without understanding them
• Treating documentation as an afterthought

The appeal is obvious. You feel productive, things get built quickly, and stakeholders are happy with the velocity. The dopamine hit from seeing features go live is real and addictive.

The Hidden Costs

The problems with vibe coding don't reveal themselves immediately. They accumulate like credit card debt - easy to rack up, painful to pay off.

1. The Maintenance Nightmare

Code written in a hurry becomes a nightmare to maintain. Six months later, you (or worse, your colleague) will stare at your own code wondering "What was I thinking?" The answer: you weren't. You were vibing.

2. The Bug Multiplication Effect

When you skip proper testing and code review, bugs don't just appear - they multiply. One hastily written function becomes the foundation for ten other features, spreading the problem like a virus through your codebase.

3. The Onboarding Disaster

Try explaining your vibe-coded system to a new team member. Without clear architecture, documentation, or consistent patterns, onboarding becomes an archaeological expedition through layers of hasty decisions.

Real-World War Stories

In our years building software, we've seen vibe coding lead to:

• The Weekend Crisis: A production outage on Saturday because nobody understood the payment processing code written during a late-night coding session three months ago.
• The Scaling Wall: A startup hitting 100K users and discovering their database architecture can't handle the load because it was "vibed" together for an MVP.
• The Security Breach: User data exposed because authentication was implemented quickly without considering proper security practices.

Finding the Balance

The answer isn't to abandon speed entirely. Startups and fast-moving teams need velocity. The key is knowing when to vibe and when to architect.

When Vibe Coding Is Acceptable:

• Proof-of-concept prototypes that will be thrown away
• Internal tools with limited scope and users
• Throwaway scripts for one-time data migrations
• Quick experiments to validate assumptions

When You Need Proper Engineering:

• User-facing features that will be maintained long-term
• Security-critical components (authentication, payments, data handling)
• Core infrastructure that other features depend on
• Anything that handles sensitive user data

The Better Way

At Fire In Belly, we've learned that sustainable velocity comes from practices that feel slow at first but compound over time:

• Write tests first: Yes, even in a hurry. Future you will thank present you.
• Code review everything: A second pair of eyes catches vibe coding before it reaches production.
• Document your decisions: A README explaining "why" is worth its weight in gold.
• Refactor incrementally: Don't let technical debt accumulate. Pay it off in small, regular installments.

Conclusion

Vibe coding feels good in the moment, but software development is a marathon, not a sprint. The real measure of engineering excellence isn't how fast you can ship the first version - it's how easily you can evolve, maintain, and scale that code over months and years.

Next time you're tempted to "just quickly vibe this feature out," pause and ask yourself: Am I building on quicksand or solid ground? Your future self - and your team - will thank you for choosing wisely.

---