"Vibe" coding is a trap in the long run

Significant-Tip-8441 March 8, 2025

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If you're using cursor, or any other AI-assisted IDE for 'vibe coding' (just feeding it with better or worse prompts, rules, getting angry at it, emoticons etc.) and have zero knowledge about how the tech stack you use is working - you are asking yourself for trouble.

Sure, LLM's are getting better in understanding, solving problems and general thinking. Sometimes when you write beautifully crafted prompt, along with your great cursor rules you've found online, you'll get great results - feature you've wanted works, bug is fixed etc.

Hell, sometimes you can even prompt your way to an app with full functionality that you've imagined - without single line of code written by yourself! Yay!

But without knowing anything about what is the logic behind this, how things work, what the code does, how it is structured among files/classes/functions, what is going on with app lifecycle, how data is stored in db/files/sessions/cache, what libraries/frameworks are used, what security/throttle measures are used (and IF they are even used) when using backend/apis etc. you're really asking yourself for trouble.

I'm a software developer since around 2012. I've created dozens of various sized projects on different stacks (js/sql/nosql/php/python/mobile/vr + all the modern frameworks) by pure hand coding - and I've been watching the whole AI boom since its beginning. Nowadays I've grown to use and even like Cursor and all the assist LLMs can give. It's now part of my workflow - and it's really making me more productive by letting AI do some tedious work under supervision.

BUT - if you don't know shit about what's going on and just rely on AI to do great product for you by talking and instructing... you will probably fail at some point.

The bigger the project is, the more it grows - the more knowledge it requires. Context window is really really low when it comes to projects with 1000s or more lines of code - and while tech people can understand how it works and where to look for something - AI is FAR FROM THAT - it doesn't really use reason, logic, it just looks for patterns it was trained with. We are far from giving whole big code repo to AI and making it understand the project like a dev who looked at the same code for a week, or even a day. Sure, there are rules, MCP, MD files - but no LLM will handle full codebase at once - and it will forget the rules and md files after some time and just create some shitty or redundant code. And you won't see it without knowledge.

Also, if you're testing everything by yourself locally, or even with your family/friends, without proper stress/security/functional tests - many things can work really different on production when even 20 people at once will do sonething with the app, let alone tens of thousands.

I know that many vibe coders, vibe startup CEOs and vibe enterpreneurs making new apps every few days here will say that It's BS, but really - you don't want to be in the situation where your app stops working, you don't know why, cursor/AI cannot fix it even if you yell at it or pretty please it (😆) and your paying customers are getting angry...

I've been there and it's not nice - sometimes even having 3 or 4 dev team members looking up the bug with you costs significant amount of time and nerves... And money

What will happen when vibe-coded apps explode, and you dont have a clue about what happened + cannot even tell some real dev how it works? And if you think that eventually you will get a dev and he will magically fix everything about your app within hours - he might - in 5 hours, or in 300 hours, when the app is so badly written that 90% needs refactor. Charging you lots of money for it

Don't just vibe-code, tell agent to fix the error or gett angry at it - try to learn what happens in each section of your app and how it works Try to find not needed or redundant code early and keep the codebase clean and structured logically. Think about efficient storing/getting data, think about security, think about how users can try to abuse your app.

And if you don't know how - do research and learn, or ask someone who does know to teach you, or you will regret it at some point

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