This was essentially my experience vibe coding a web app. I got great results initially and made it quite far quickly but over time velocity exponentially slowed due to exactly this cognitive debt. Took my time and did a ground up rewrite manually and made way faster progress and a much more stable app.
You could argue LLMs let me learn enough about the product I was trying to build that the second rewrite was faster and better informed, and that’s probably true to some degree, but it also was quite a few weeks down the drain.
You could argue LLMs let me learn enough about the product I was trying to build that the second rewrite was faster and better informed, and that’s probably true to some degree, but it also was quite a few weeks down the drain.