Vibe coding hits debugging wall

This is the core tradeoff of AI-assisted coding right now: generation is cheap, comprehension is still expensive.

• –Prompt-driven coding is great at momentum, but weak at surgical edits where developers need predictable, fine-grained control.
• –Once an LLM-generated project sprawls beyond your mental model, debugging gets slower because you are now reverse-engineering both the bug and the AI’s architecture choices.
• –Simon Willison’s framing is the useful one: vibe coding is best treated as a prototype workflow, not a blanket label for all responsible AI-assisted development.
• –The real bottleneck is not code output anymore; it is whether developers can still explain, test, and safely maintain what the model produced.