There is a pattern I keep noticing with vibe coding, and I have fallen into it myself.

Someone has an idea. They open an AI editor like Cursor or Claude. They prompt the AI. Code starts appearing. Endpoints, components, UI, and database tables. Within a few days, there’s something that works. It feels fast and productive. That’s vibe coding. The problem becomes what you are skipping to get that speed. Most vibe-coded projects ship features into existence quickly without understanding the core architecture that makes the feature coherent. You realize you don't really know how data flows, which parts are stateful, which are stateless, or what assumptions you just baked in. Most importantly, you are unaware of what breaks when traffic grows or when one requirement changes.

Usually, everything appears to be alright for a short while. Then, after six months, a minor issue arises. When you choose to add one more feature, the system as a whole starts to feel unstable. You start to fear interacting with the codebase. Bugs start to appear in areas that you haven't even edited. When faced with a system that is performing poorly, most people become so frustrated that they rewrite everything.

Why do you think vibe coding fails long-term?

Most vibe coding prioritizes local correctness over global structure.

At first, I made this error. I was concentrating on finding a solution to the issue at hand, which typically entails saying things like, "I need an endpoint for this, I need a table for that, I'll just add a flag here." However, architectural design typically involves choices that are not immediately clear. I began concentrating on asking questions about things like where truth resides, what owns state, what is derived versus stored, and what should and shouldn't change frequently. Nowadays, I deliberately take my time before writing actual code when I have an idea, not because I want to write a 20-page specification or overdesign, but just enough to avoid painting myself into a corner.

Here is the flow I now focus on. Instead of saying, "I want to build a ticketing app," I try to shift the focus and ask, "What system am I actually building?" In the case of a ticketing application, the answer would look like this: A system that ingests events, manages inventory over time, handles concurrent purchases, enforces consistency under race conditions, and reconciles payments and failures. Asking these questions already stops you from jumping straight into UI or endpoints.

Once you have those answers, this is where AI is actually very powerful, if you use it correctly. You can go ahead and ask, what are the components of the ticketing system, where does the race condition occur, what data must be strongly consistent, and what can be eventually consistent? AI is great at laying out conceptual pipelines like request flow, write paths, read paths, and failure modes. At this stage, I still haven’t written a single line of production code.

The next step is crucial, as most people skip this part. After I have the suggested architecture, I use RFCs, design documents, engineering write-ups (like mine 🙂), and blog entries from businesses that have developed comparable systems to sanity-check it. Locking strategies, queues, idempotency, and eventual consistency tradeoffs are all likely to be discussed in relation to ticketing in particular. Instead of relying solely on model output, this step grounds your design in reality. Vibe coding skips this filtering step, as everything gets added until the system collapses under its own complexity.

Only now can you start coding; with this approach you are not guessing, and you know each file has a reason to exist, each service has a boundary, and each database table has a clear owner. You can still move quickly, but that speed comes from clarity, not improvisation.

Vibe coding feels quick because it avoids thinking up front, whereas architecture feels slow because it forces you to confront constraints early. But the true cost emerges later. I am not anti-AI; I use it frequently. But I've learned to use it as an architecture partner rather than just a code generator. Shipping quickly should not mean sacrificing structure. It should imply constructing the proper structure first so that speed does not turn into debt later on.

If you are going to vibe code, at least know what you are vibing into.