Table of contents

• What is vibe coding?
• Inconsistent code quality and style
• Maintainability and technical debt
• Debugging and testing challenges
• Vibe coding vs. structured development
• How Diamond can help catch vibe coding issues
• Conclusion

What is vibe coding?

Vibe coding refers to a style of software development driven by intuition, momentum, and spontaneous decision-making. Instead of following structured planning or design principles, the developer “goes with the flow,” coding based on what feels right in the moment. This method favors speed and creativity over structure.

You’ll often see vibe coding in hackathons, personal side projects, or creative experiments where fast iteration trumps long-term maintainability. Developers using this approach might skip writing documentation, tests, or architectural plans just to keep the energy going.

While vibe coding can lead to breakthroughs and rapid results, it has notable downsides—especially once a codebase grows or is touched by other developers.

Inconsistent code quality and style

One of the earliest red flags in a vibe-coded project is inconsistency. Without agreed conventions or code standards, different modules often reflect the mood or habits of whoever wrote them.

For example, a developer might use camelCase for API responses in one file, while another opts for snake_case in a separate module. One function might include thoughtful error handling; another might silently fail. Over time, the result is a patchwork of clashing styles and logic.

This lack of cohesion doesn’t just look messy—it creates real friction. Teams spend more time deciphering what each piece is doing rather than building new functionality. Even solo developers can lose track of their own logic after a few weeks away from the code.

Maintainability and technical debt

Vibe coding often accelerates early-stage development—but at the cost of long-term maintainability. Because decisions are made on the fly, the resulting code can be hard to understand, test, or extend.

You’re likely to see:

• large, multi-purpose functions with unclear boundaries.
• cryptic variable and function names.
• missing documentation or context for critical decisions.

Take a startup that built its MVP in a few weeks using this approach. At first, things moved fast. But six months later, every new feature requires hours of spelunking into unstructured, undocumented code. Technical debt has piled up, and onboarding new developers becomes increasingly painful. The initial time saved is now being repaid with interest.

Debugging and testing challenges

Another major pitfall is the lack of robust testing and debugging support. When you code based on vibes, setting up test infrastructure often feels like a drag. As a result, it’s frequently postponed or skipped entirely.

This creates downstream problems:

• untested edge cases cause runtime failures
• error handling is inconsistent or nonexistent
• debugging becomes time-consuming due to unclear logic

Imagine a vibe-coded data pipeline that fails silently when it receives an empty dataset. There’s no logging or validation to catch the problem. Without a test suite to simulate various inputs, developers must rely on manual inspection and trial-and-error to find the root cause. The productivity boost from skipping tests quickly turns into lost time and frustration.

Vibe coding vs. structured development

While vibe coding emphasizes speed and spontaneity, structured development favors predictability and long-term stability.

Structured development typically includes:

• clearly defined architecture
• consistent coding standards and naming conventions
• test coverage and documentation baked into the workflow

That might sound slower, and initially it is. But the payoff comes when your code is still understandable and extensible months—or years—down the line. In contrast, vibe-coded projects tend to degrade quickly as the codebase scales or as team size increases.

That said, you don’t have to choose one extreme. Many experienced teams start projects in a flexible, vibe-driven way and introduce more structure as the codebase solidifies. The trick is knowing when to switch gears.

How Diamond can help catch vibe coding issues

If you’ve already gone down the vibe coding path—or inherited a codebase that has—tools like Diamond, Graphite’s AI-powered code review assistant, can help mitigate the downsides.

Diamond is trained to catch common pitfalls that arise from unstructured coding, including:

• inconsistent naming and formatting
• overly large or non-modular functions
• missing documentation or test coverage
• security oversights or hardcoded credentials

Diamond is codebase-aware. That means it can identify when new code deviates from established patterns or introduces complexity that should be flagged before it’s merged.

For instance, if someone commits a 200-line function with no tests, unclear variable names, and inconsistent indentation, Diamond will raise alerts for each of these issues—and recommend specific fixes. This is especially helpful when vibe coding has resulted in technical debt that human reviewers might overlook out of fatigue or time pressure.

By integrating tools like Diamond into your workflow, you create a safety net that preserves some of the agility of vibe coding without sacrificing long-term code quality.

Conclusion

Vibe coding isn’t inherently bad—it’s just situational. It works well for short-term experimentation, fast demos, or exploratory coding. But its limitations become clear once the code needs to scale, be maintained by others, or run in production.

To recap:

• Use vibe coding when speed and creativity are your top goals
• Avoid relying on it for production systems or shared codebases
• Layer in structure (tests, patterns, documentation) as the project matures
• Use tools like Diamond to review and improve vibe-written code automatically

The key is not to kill your creative flow—but to follow it up with review, structure, and discipline before your code goes live.