Vibe coding is fun until your own code becomes a black box
I've been vibe coding for about 6 months now. Built a side project, a small SaaS, even helped a friend's startup ship an MVP in a weekend. It's incredible.
But here's what nobody talks about: three months later, when I need to add a feature or fix a bug in something I "wrote" — I have no idea how my own code works.
I prompted my way through it. The AI made architectural decisions I didn't review. Now I'm staring at files I technically created but can't explain to a teammate. I'm essentially a
tourist in my own codebase.
The worst part? When something breaks, I can't debug it. I don't know why the auth middleware calls the refresh token endpoint twice. I didn't write that logic. I just said "add
token refresh" and moved on.
So I started doing something different: after I vibe code a feature, I go back and actually learn what was generated. Not line by line — that's soul-crushing. More like: what's the
flow, what are the key functions, what are the gotchas.
I built a small tool to help with this. It uses Claude Code to walk you through a codebase like a senior dev would — asks your background first, then adapts the explanations, tracks
what you've actually understood vs. what you skimmed. It's called Luojz/study-code, on my github. But even without a tool, I think the practice of "post-vibe review" is something
we should be talking about more.
Vibe coding without understanding is just accumulating debt you'll pay in panic later.
Anyone else feeling this? How do you handle it — just keep prompting and hope for the best?