Vibe coding will hand you 80% of an app before you've finished your coffee. That's the seduction — and the trap. The last 20% (the part that makes it stable, secure, and maintainable) is where most vibe-coded projects quietly fall apart. The good news: the difference between people who ship and people who get stuck isn't talent or taste. It's a small set of habits. Here they are.
The loopWork in a tight cycle, not one giant prompt
Every good vibe-coding session runs the same loop. Don't try to describe the whole app at once — steer it one step at a time.
Rule 1Prompt small, then refine
The single most common mistake is writing a novel-length prompt up front. Too much detail actually makes the output worse — the model loses the thread. Keep your opening spec to roughly 30–80 words: one clear outcome plus the context it needs. Then add the specifics in follow-ups, once you can see what it produced.
- "Build me a full SaaS with auth, billing, a dashboard, dark mode, email, and…"
- Cram every requirement and edge case into one giant message.
- "Add a page where a signed-in user uploads a CSV and sees a chart of the totals."
- Then: "Good — now handle a malformed file with a clear error."
Rule 2Iterate — never regenerate
When the output is 90% right, the temptation is to hit regenerate and hope. Resist it. Regenerating throws away everything that was working; iterating builds on it. Tell the AI exactly what to change — "keep this, but make the button submit the form" — and you keep your progress instead of rolling the dice again.
Treat the AI like a fast, talented junior dev: give it one clear task, read what it hands back, and correct it — don't ask it to redo the whole thing from scratch.
Rule 3Commit before every change
Version control isn't optional here — it's your undo button, and you'll need it constantly. AI can break three things while fixing one, and without a clean checkpoint you're stuck untangling a mess. So commit every working state before you ask for the next change. When a prompt goes sideways, you revert to the last good commit and try a different angle. This one habit will save you more grief than any other.
Rule 4Read every line — it's not free code
AI writes code that looks right at a glance, which is exactly why it's dangerous. It hallucinates functions that don't exist, misses edge cases, and skips the unglamorous parts — error handling, validation, security. The data is blunt about it:
So review every diff before you accept it, and prompt for safety explicitly: "use parameterized queries," "validate the input," "don't hardcode secrets." It listens when you ask — it just won't volunteer.
Rule 5Break big asks into steps
When you need something complex — a multi-step flow, a background job, a tricky integration — don't ask for it in one shot. Spell out the pieces in sequence: the trigger, the logic, the routing, the result. Get each one working (and committed) before moving to the next. The AI is far more reliable across three small, verified prompts than one sprawling one.
Rule 6Actually test it
QA is the step everyone skips — and the reason "it worked in the demo" becomes "it's down in production." You don't need a full test suite on day one, but you do need to click through the real paths, try the bad inputs, and ask the AI to write a few tests for the critical logic. A prototype passes when it works once; a product passes when it keeps working.
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— The Vertos team