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Key Takeaways
- Vibe coding refers to fast, unstructured development typical in early-stage MVPs.
- While effective short-term, vibe coding leads to fragile codebases and mounting tech debt.
- Common symptoms include slow dev velocity, repeated bugs, and difficult onboarding.
- Startups must transition from “just working” to “built to scale” to survive growth.
- Cleaning up doesn’t require a full rewrite—targeted refactoring and process upgrades are often enough.
- A strategic code audit helps identify and prioritize high-risk areas.
- Investing in documentation, testing, and CI/CD improves stability and developer confidence.
- Vibe coding cleanup is essential before scaling your product, team, or investor pitch.
At the start, everything feels electric.
You’ve got an idea, a scrappy team (or not), and just enough vibe to build a prototype in two weeks. You’re moving fast. Users are clicking. People are curious. The vibe is immaculate.
But behind the scenes?
Quite often your code is held together by shortcuts and commented-out lines no one dares to delete.
Welcome to the phase we call vibe coding - where momentum is king, and structure takes a backseat.
It gets you to market.
It gets you traction.
And if you don’t stop soon, it’ll also get you stuck.
This article is about what happens when you outgrow your MVP codebase, why it’s quietly slowing your team down, and how to clean things up before it breaks your product or your business.
What is vibe coding, anyway?
“Move fast and break things,” they said.
You did. And it worked!
Vibe coding is meant for validation. It’s that early-stage energy where building something that works is more important than building something that lasts. And that’s totally normal (for a while).
In vibe coding mode, your team is:
- Skipping architecture decisions in favor of “just get it running”
- Copy-pasting instead of abstracting
- Ignoring testing because “we’ll refactor later”
- Forgetting documentation because “we all know what this does”
- Shipping directly to production and praying it holds
And it’s all fine until you realize that while you’re celebrating quick wins on the outside, your codebase is slowly turning into a liability on the inside.
The hidden cost of staying in MVP mode
Vibe coding is meant to be temporary. But many teams get stuck there far too long, usually because the product is “working,” users are growing, and you want to move forward with new features.
But under the surface, things are slowly falling apart.
Here’s what we often see when startups outgrow their MVP code but keep building on top of it:
- Dev velocity tanks
What used to take a day now takes a week because touching any part of the code feels risky. - Onboarding new devs is painful
There’s no documentation, no conventions, and no clear logic behind past decisions. - Fixing one bug creates two more
The codebase is so fragile that even minor changes cause regressions. - Your team is constantly firefighting
Instead of innovating, they're stuck maintaining or rewriting old features. - You start fearing your own roadmap
The cost of change becomes unpredictable.
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