After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand — and I'm not surprised

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand — and I'm not surprised

The Hacker News post hit 800+ upvotes in hours. Developers are quietly admitting what many of us have been feeling: letting AI write all your code feels great until it doesn't.

I've been vibe coding hard while building ListingVid, my AI video tool for real estate agents. The speed is unreal. Features that used to take days now ship in hours. But last week, I spent three full days refactoring 20 minutes of agent-generated code. The logic worked. The architecture was a tire fire.

Here's where the hype diverges from my actual experience.

The context

We're in a weird moment where "vibe coding" has become a personality trait. There's pressure to let the agent handle everything — to treat engineering judgment as overhead rather than value. The narrative is that AI replaces the craft. My 15 years building digital products tells a different story.

What I actually shipped this week

I rebuilt a core video processing pipeline in ListingVid. The first version was agent-generated and "worked" — videos rendered, uploads completed, notifications sent. But the error handling was nonexistent. Retry logic was duct tape. The code that handled file cleanup? It didn't. I found orphaned files eating storage because the agent never considered failure modes.

So I rewrote it. Slower. More carefully. With actual thought about what happens when S3 times out or FFmpeg crashes mid-render.

The real lessons

• AI excels at exploration, not foundation. Let it prototype. Don't let it architect your data layer.
• "It works" is not "it's done." Agent code often passes the happy path and dies on edge cases you haven't thought of yet.
• Your judgment is the product. The 15 years of shipping, breaking things, and fixing them at 2am — that's what AI can't replicate. It can generate code, but it can't generate the scar tissue that tells you where the bugs hide.
• Speed now costs time later. Every shortcut the agent takes is debt you'll pay with interest. The question is whether you're building a prototype or a business.
• The best use of AI is augmentation, not replacement. I still use it constantly. But I use it for boilerplate, tests, and exploration — not for the parts of the system that need to be reliable.

I'm not going back to zero AI. That would be stupid. But I'm done pretending that vibe coding is a substitute for engineering. It's a tool. A powerful one. But tools don't replace judgment — they amplify it.

If you're building something that needs to last, own the foundations. Let the agent handle the noise. You handle the signal.

Follow me at @lmoncany for more unfiltered builder notes. Currently shipping ListingVid — AI video generation for real estate agents who are tired of paying €500 per property video.