April 15, 2026
When vibes meet version control
Vibe Coding Fails
Dev says AI loves flashy fixes, crowd says it edits one file and calls it a day
TLDR: A dev showed how an AI coding helper proposed slick but useless fixes for a broken approval popup. Commenters say these chatbots over-engineer, touch one file, and need human guidance, sparking debate over whether “vibe coding” builds brittle systems or just wastes time.
“Vibe coding” just hit a wall, and the comments lit up. A developer shared how their AI helper (think a chatty code robot, aka an LLM) tried to fix a missing approval popup by… saving state to disk and faking results in logs. Sounds fancy, but after a restart those “fixes” don’t matter — they add complexity without solving the real issue. Cue the chorus: over-engineering theater. The community’s strongest take? These tools love solutions that look smart while ignoring whether they help in the real world.
Commenters piled on with receipts. One team ran dozens of tasks across many codebases and saw the same pattern: the agent edits one obvious file and taps out, leaving tests, configs, and sibling files stale. Another confession: you can only code with AI if you already know the answer — otherwise it’ll confidently build your bad idea faster. The drama centers on a simple question: Do these AI coders need a strict human boss, or are they just not ready for solo missions?
Humor flew too: folks joked about “Rube Goldberg engineering” and “ship-shaped logs with sunk features.” The vibe: less magic, more common sense. The verdict from the crowd? Ask: does this even matter after a restart? If not, drop the fancy fix and ship reality instead.
Key Points
- •The workflow uses Claude to manage an approval-gated agent loop, with bug detection, root cause analysis, architectural evaluation, task specification, and implementation phases.
- •A key bug: approval popups can be missed if the UI is disconnected (e.g., refresh, backgrounding, flaky network), with no retry or recovery.
- •When approvals are interrupted by crashes or restarts, an orphan tool_call remains without a matching tool_result in session history.
- •Proposed fix to persist approval state to disk is rejected because the system cold-resumes from the session log and wouldn’t use that state, adding unnecessary schema complexity.
- •Proposed fix to write synthetic tool_result is rejected as unnecessary and risky; existing systems tolerate missing results and the orphan entry reflects actual events.