Anna Buczak
5
min read
Last Update:
September 22, 2025

Key Takeaways

  • Vibe coding is perfect for the early stages of product development, especially when speed and feedback are more important than scalability.
  • It’s best for MVPs, prototypes, or projects with uncertain direction, where iteration speed outweighs long-term stability.
  • Over time, vibe coding can lead to technical debt, spaghetti code, and performance issues, making further development slower and more expensive.
  • When your product is ready to scale, onboard more developers, or handle bigger user bases, it’s often time for a vibe coding cleanup.
  • Cleanup isn’t just about “clean code”. It’s a strategic investment that enables sustainable growth, faster feature delivery, and improved stability.

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If you’re building a new product, chances are you’ve faced this question:
“Should we move fast with vibe coding or invest time in clean, scalable architecture?”

For many founders, this decision isn’t easy. On one hand, speed is everything, you want to ship quickly, test ideas, and see if the market cares. On the other, there’s the fear of ending up with a messy, fragile codebase that slows you down later. Vibe coding promises rapid development and fast feedback, but it also comes with risks that can block growth if used for too long.

We see this scenario all the time: a small team uses vibe coding to launch an MVP fast, validate their idea, and gain traction… but then the problems start. Bugs pile up and adding new features feels like wading through mud. Suddenly, what once fueled progress starts holding the product back.

That’s where vibe coding cleanup comes into play. This isn’t about saying vibe coding is “wrong” - far from it. It’s about knowing when to use it and when to transition into a more stable, maintainable setup. The goal isn’t to write “perfect code” from day one but to make smart, strategic decisions about how to build and scale your product.

In this article, we’ll break down what vibe coding really is, when it makes sense, where it backfires, and how to recognize the moment to clean up and move forward. By the end, you’ll have a clear framework to decide if vibe coding is right for you and when to evolve beyond it.

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Ideal Situations for Vibe Coding

Vibe coding works best in environments where learning speed outweighs technical perfection. Situations where it shines include:

  • Market validation / pre-PMF phases – If you’re uncertain whether an idea has genuine traction, vibe coding helps you test fast, pivot quickly, and avoid over-engineering features that may never matter.
  • MVPs and prototypes – At this stage, the value lies in showing the experience to users and stakeholders — not in building a system that will survive years of scaling.
  • High-uncertainty projects – When requirements shift rapidly, the ability to deploy something lightweight and adjust instantly is far more useful than a rigid system.
  • Resource-constrained teams – When time and budget are tight, vibe coding enables tangible progress without the overhead of full-scale engineering processes.

Importantly, vibe coding isn’t “just for not-technical people” or “solo-founder CTOs.” Even seasoned teams may choose this approach when they need to validate concepts quickly, provided they have a plan for transitioning later. The real difference is whether the team can recognize vibe coding as a short-term accelerator — and whether they have access to technical expertise to handle the cleanup when the time comes.

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Why Problems Arise After Vibe Coding

The challenges with vibe coding don’t show up right away, they emerge once the product moves from experimentation into growth mode. Common issues stem from the very shortcuts that made early progress possible:

Technical debt

While vibe coding is a powerful tool for rapid prototyping, it comes with natural trade-offs that start to show once a product begins to gain traction. The same shortcuts that allow teams to move fast in the early stages often create technical debt - a collection of messy solutions, missing documentation, and quick fixes that work “for now” but aren’t built to last.

Scaling limits

One of the biggest issues arises when the product is ready to scale or grow rapidly. At this point, the original codebase (designed for speed rather than stability) often struggles to handle increased complexity, larger user bases, or expanding features. What once felt efficient now starts causing performance bottlenecks, unexpected bugs, and integration headaches.

Slowed feature delivery

Another common challenge is that technical debt begins slowing down feature development. As the codebase becomes harder to navigate, developers spend more time debugging than building new features. This slows innovation and can frustrate both the team and stakeholders. In extreme cases, onboarding new engineers becomes a major pain point, as understanding the existing structure takes weeks instead of days.

Onboarding friction

It’s also important to note that vibe coding isn’t a permanent, scalable strategy. While it excels in environments of uncertainty, its effectiveness drops sharply when a product transitions into growth mode. Without proper refactoring or cleanup, teams risk reaching a point where every small change introduces instability, making it harder to respond to user needs or business opportunities.

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This doesn’t mean vibe coding is inherently “bad.” It simply means its benefits taper off beyond the prototype/MVP phase. If not refactored, a vibe-coded system eventually flips from enabling flexibility → to blocking progress. Recognizing that inflection point is often the difference between products that scale smoothly and those that stall.

Rafał Nowicki
Fullstack Developer at ULAM LABS

When Does Vibe Coding Cleanup Make Sense

Nearly every successful product built with vibe coding eventually needs a cleanup phase. The question isn’t if, but when.

There comes a point in nearly every product’s lifecycle when the speed-first approach of vibe coding starts to reach its limits. What once gave your team the ability to iterate rapidly now begins to slow progress instead of accelerating it. This often happens when the product idea is validated and the focus shifts from experimenting to scaling, optimizing, and delivering long-term value.

We’ve written a whole text about signals indicating it’s time for a cleanup. But if your team starts noticing frequent bugs, recurring crashes, or unpredictable behavior, it’s a clear sign that technical debt is no longer just a small inconvenience - it’s becoming a roadblock to growth. Similarly, if adding new features takes significantly longer than before or developers struggle to understand and modify the existing codebase, it’s time to consider a more structured approach.

This is where vibe coding cleanup comes in. Vibe coding cleanup is not about scrapping everything and starting over. It’s about refactoring the essential foundation so your product can:

  • Scale to larger user bases.
  • Support a steady stream of new features.
  • Onboard developers quickly instead of bogging them down.
  • Improve reliability so users and stakeholders trust it.

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Ultimately, vibe coding cleanup isn’t about fixing code for the sake of aesthetics but about unlocking your product’s full potential and preparing it for the next stage of its journey. Think of this step as an investment in leverage. By stabilizing the structure, you not only remove roadblocks, you set the stage for faster delivery and longer-term agility.

Ready to move beyond quick experiments and set your product up for sustainable growth? Follow our step-by-step guide on fixing an MVP that was built with vibe coding.

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Conclusion

Vibe coding can be an incredible accelerator when used at the right time and in the right context. It’s a powerful tool for startups, innovators, and small teams looking to test ideas quickly, validate hypotheses, and get products in front of users without months of over-engineering. 

But it’s not designed for long-term scale. That’s why the real advantage comes from using vibe coding strategically, then pairing it with seasoned expertise for the transition into growth.

Ask yourself:

  1. Are we still in the experimental phase, or are we building for scale?
  2. Is our current codebase accelerating progress, or starting to slow it down?

Answering these honestly will help determine whether vibe coding still serves you or whether it’s time to shift gears into cleanup and structured engineering.

If you’re unsure where your project stands or want to explore how to transition from rapid prototyping to sustainable growth, we’re here to help. Every product journey is unique, and sometimes having an expert perspective can save months of frustration, wasted effort, and costly rework.

By understanding when vibe coding makes sense and when it’s time to evolve beyond it - you set your team up for both short-term agility and long-term success.

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If your vibe coding app is starting to show the limits of quick hacks, we can help. Our team specializes in cleaning up early-stage codebases and turning them into scalable, reliable products. Let's talk!

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