Vibe Coding Works — Until It Doesn’t (Editorial/Thought piece)

For the record: I’m pro AI-assisted development.

I use it.
I like it.
It works for me – most of the time.

But…

If your workflow is:

Open a prompt → describe a loosely defined idea → keep adding, tweaking, and fixing along the way…

Then in my experience:

Things can get out of hand. Fast.

Not because AI is bad.
But because structure quietly disappears.

You skip steps you did not even notice were doing important work:

And then things start to drift:

Nothing necessarily breaks right away.

But the system slowly becomes harder to trust.

One reason is easy to miss:

The AI adapts to your last prompt, not your intended system.

And that is exactly what people tend to overlook.

Because each individual step can seem reasonable, while the overall structure quietly degrades.

So the problem is not “vibe coding” itself.

It is unconstrained vibe coding.

AI does not remove the need for discipline.
It removes the friction that used to enforce it.

So the question is no longer:

“How do I prompt better?”

It becomes:

“How do I avoid fooling myself while moving fast?”

For me, the answer is fairly simple:

That’s it.

Not especially sexy.
But it works.

So yes – use AI.

Just do not mistake speed for structure.

Thanks for reading this…

P.S. here’s a little takeaway…

A simple way to keep AI-assisted coding from drifting:

Before asking the AI to write code, have it answer this first:

Nothing fancy.

But it forces back the structure that AI workflows otherwise make very easy to skip.