If you're an AI-powered developer—shipping products at warp speed with ChatGPT, Copilot, and other LLM wizardry—you’ve probably noticed that your stack occasionally feels... fragile.

Tech debt isn't a badge of dishonour; it's just the natural friction of moving fast. But AI-assisted workflows amplify this friction, often before you've even noticed. Let’s unpack ten common traps vibe coders stumble into, and some quick guardrails to avoid them.

🔟 The Ten Tech Debt Traps

1. Prompt Soup

"Wait, what does this prompt do again?"

A tangled mess of random instructions, forgotten revisions, and obscure hacks. Each tweak seemed harmless, but now your prompts look like ancient runes.

Guardrail: Keep prompts in your version control: myproject/prompts. Simple comments like // tries fixing edge-case 42 go a long way.

2. Copy-Paste Pattern Explosion

You had five different tasks dealing with JSON. Claude suggested five perfectly valid ways to parse JSON. Without checking, you used them all, and now you have to keep up with five different JSON dependencies.

Guardrail: Pick one pattern to do each thing, document it clearly. Ask the LLM to follow established practices in your project prompt.

3. No Tests, Just Vibes

If GPT says it works, who are you to argue? Until the bug reports pour in.

Guardrail: Automated tests, even simple ones, make your vibes much happier long-term. The good news? LLMs are really good at writing tests, and asking them to think about testing before you start generating code will get error handling and consistency into context.

4. Single-File Syndrome

What began as "I'll just prototype this quickly" becomes a monstrous app.js or main.py file that terrifies anyone who dares scroll down.

Guardrail: Think modules, think separation of concerns. Fifteen files are easier to manage (and you can navigate context more easily) than 5,000 lines in one file.

5. Untamed Dependencies

GPT happily invents packages like awesome-but-imaginary-lib (or worse, hallucinates functionality that doesn't exist in the dependency) and you just shrugged and npm installed it anyway.

Guardrail: Validate dependencies manually (or ask GPT to explain why it's suggesting them).

6. Mystery Meat Middleware

"I don't know why it works, but GPT spat it out and nothing exploded... yet."

Guardrail: Ask your AI why it’s suggesting middleware. If neither of you can clearly explain, step back.

7. All Brain, No Logs

Everything seems fine until your AI pipeline silently fails—at 2am on launch day, naturally.

Guardrail: Even small apps need logs. One well-placed log can save you hours of stress. Don't use console.log or other print debug statements, ask your LLM to suggest logging libraries for your language, pick one, use it ruthlessly through development. Thank me later.

8. Magic Numbers Everywhere

"Why exactly did we choose 42 again?"

Your codebase has become an archaeological dig filled with mysterious numbers that once made sense—but now leave you scratching your head.

Guardrail: Replace magic numbers with clearly labelled constants (MAX_RETRY_COUNT, DEFAULT_TIMEOUT_MS) and reuse them across your application. Make a constants.h file (or your language equivalent), add it to your prompt as a reference, it'll probably be a few thousand tokens. Future-you will thank present-you.

9. Docs? What Docs?

"Documentation? My prompts are self-explanatory."

They aren't. Future-you or future-AI will thank present-you for even basic docs.

Guardrail: Write a quick README and inline comments. It helps GPT and humans alike (most importantly, you, three months from now) understand your intentions. LLMs are really good at generating docs.

10. Zero Exit Strategy

Fast prototypes become production overnight. Now you're stuck with a brittle app that’s nearly impossible to refactor.

Guardrail: Prototype, but always ask: "If I had to rewrite or replace this tomorrow, how painful would it be?" Keep an exit hatch.

🛡️ Guardrails, Not Guilt

Let's be clear: none of these issues make you a "bad" developer. AI-driven workflows are still new territory, and even seasoned devs slip here. The difference between chaos and craftsmanship isn’t perfection; it's just adding tiny guardrails along the way.

Here’s a quick checklist to build into your flow without killing your velocity:

  • ✅ Prompt hygiene: Keep versions tidy and understandable.
  • ✅ Test early, test small: Simple sanity checks go miles.
  • ✅ Docs, lightly seasoned: Short comments > long apologies.
  • ✅ Logs as breadcrumbs: Quick diagnostics pay off immensely.
  • ✅ Config separate from prompts: Clear boundaries, fewer headaches.

🚀 Moving Fast, Safely

Your creativity and speed as a vibe coder aren't the enemy—far from it. With a little structured thinking, you keep your velocity and your sanity. So keep building, keep experimenting, and don't fear the tech debt monster.

It bites only if ignored.