Who got the vibe? It’s the tribe yall..
TL;DR: When vibe coding, context is everything and knowledge is power!
I consider myself a generalist — I know a little bit about a lot of things. I do a pretty good job of synthesizing how systems operate and figuring out how things work at a high level, but I’ve been around long enough to know where to look when things go wrong. So for me, the idea of vibe coding feels like quite the boon! I can operate at a high level of abstraction while my AI coding partner does the building.
Unfortunately, what I’ve found is that my AI coding partner doesn’t always know what it’s doing — and it doesn’t always understand why I want to do something a certain way. Whether it’s proposing a code change that creates an infinite loop multiple times (because it doesn’t realize the Python RegEx parser it’s using has trouble with a particular sequence) or removing a line of code that was included to work around a compiler bug — it’s easy to forget that an AI coding partner doesn’t really know anything and context may often limited.
I’m about to jump into the weeds here — so buckle up for some real-world examples.
Logger, Which Logger?
I asked my vibe coding partner to recommend a logger for an app I was working on. At the time, I was just using console.log. I mentioned that I eventually wanted to refactor the backend to use NestJS instead of Express. My partner recommended Pino, since it integrates well with NestJS. This worked fine for simple objects but fell short for complex ones. My first fix was to provide a serialization function, but Pino runs as a worker — so it didn’t have the necessary context. In the end, I wound up serializing objects before logging them. After iterating a few times with my AI partner, I finally Googled it — and immediately found the real issue.
A Curious Case of Pagination
I was pretty happy when my vibe coding partner recommended backing up the database for my app, and the plan it came up with was solid. But it ran into issues implementing the plan: it couldn’t capture the full output from AWS CLI commands because the results were paginated. My AI partner tried multiple times but finally just continued without the necessary output. I had to remind it that the CLI response was paginated — and then we were off and running again.
Database, Which Database?
During an audit of my app, my vibe coding partner suggested switching from SQLite to PostgreSQL. But when I described the use case, it agreed SQLite would work just fine. Yet when it generated my deployment config, it still assumed a PostgreSQL database anyway!
Final Thoughts
Remember: your AI coding partner may not have all the context you’re holding in your head — and it might even lose context you’ve already provided. When you’re vibe coding, never forget that your AI doesn’t really know anything — it just gets statistically close enough that it feels like it does.
So remember: you know nothing, vibe coder — and neither does your AI. But together, you might just know enough.
Have you run into vibe coding pitfalls? I’d love to hear your stories — drop them in the comments!
