At what point does vibe coding stop feeling like magic and start feeling like technical debt?

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The initial speed of vibe coding is intoxicating:

  • You describe a full stack architecture in plain English.

  • An agent spins up auth, database models, and API routes in 10 minutes.

  • The MVP is live before your coffee gets cold.

But once you hit the 30-day mark:

  • Making a minor styling or state change causes three unrelated modules to collapse.

  • The agent starts hallucinating fixes and rewriting files you never asked it to touch.

  • You spend twice as long reviewing generated PRs as you would have spent writing it manually.

For those building real products with AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Bolt, Lovable):

How are you keeping the codebase maintainable once the "prompting honeymoon" ends? Do you enforce strict rules/linters, or do you eventually rewrite the core logic by hand?

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It's magic at first. Then it's fun. Then it's some work. Then it's a nightmare. Then, it's magic again because you have figured out the right AI stack.