Vibe coding feels great… until debugging

John Nguyen — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 08:55:51 +0000

The hidden problem with fast-growing codebases (and why debugging gets harder over time)

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of “vibe coding” 😄
(build fast, ship fast, iterate fast)

At the beginning, everything feels great:

Features ship quickly
The app works
You feel productive

But as the codebase grows…

Something starts to change.

Not suddenly, but gradually:

Code becomes harder to review deeply
Bugs take longer to understand
Bad performance
And most importantly… it becomes harder to trace the root cause

It’s not about bad code

At first, I thought:

“Maybe the code quality isn’t good enough”

But that wasn’t really the problem.

The real issue was:

I was losing the ability to reason about the system

The real pain: losing traceability

When the system is small:

You know where state comes from
You know what triggers what
You can mentally simulate the flow

But when it grows:

State updates happen across many places
Transitions become implicit
Logic is distributed and harder to follow

And then:

You can no longer reconstruct what actually happened

What happens when you lose traceability?

Debugging becomes guesswork
Fixes feel uncertain
Performance issues are treated at the symptom level
You lose confidence in the system

A simple idea: what if state had a clear flow?

This led me to a simple question:

What if we could see how state moves through the system?

Instead of scattered updates, think in terms of:

state → action → next state

Where every transition is explicit and traceable.

I built a small experiment

I turned this idea into a small library:

react-state-flow

What improved (for me)

After trying this approach:

I could trace what happened more easily
State changes became predictable
Debugging had a clear direction instead of guessing

Open questions

I’d really love feedback from others:

Do you face similar issues in large codebases?
Does this approach make sense, or is it over-engineering?

If you read this far — thank you 🙏
If you find this useful, feel free to give it a ⭐ on GitHub!
Would love to hear your thoughts.

DEV Community: John Nguyen