The Relationship: Honeymoon, Comedown, Temptation

Every vibe coding journey starts with the honeymoon phase. Everything goes fast. Nobody is confronting you with anything. Discussions go smoothly. Everything gets built and you look forward to the future. You open your tool, describe a feature in plain language, and working code materializes in seconds. The feeling is electric.

But after a while, things get harder. More people, more processes, more discussions. You are no longer building for the future. Instead, you are just maintaining your processes, maintaining your relations, maintaining your revenue. Everything that was about innovation gets replaced by maintenance. The comedown sets in.

Then comes the temptation. You are no longer alone. You start looking for possibilities that could bring back that feeling of the first months: the excitement, the speed, everything going well. A new tool, a new model, a new framework promising to solve everything. But whatever the temptation offers, it is always your own choice to go for it. The tool is never the problem. Your discipline is.

Trap 1: Wheat (Explore Everything, Commit to Nothing)

infoThe High

You feel relaxed, creative, and your exploratory velocity is at a peak. You are doing 6 to 8 features every week. Ideas flow. Proof of concepts appear in minutes. Your frontend momentum feels high. Everybody thinks you are a creative genius.

warningThe Crash

A lot of ideas make it to production that are not stable and have to be fixed anyway. Nobody knows how because they are not documented. They were unvalidated experiments that got shipped as if they were commitments. You are not the creative genius you thought. You just forgot to label the distinction between what was real and what was just an experiment.

The practice: separate your exploration from your actual commitment. There is a huge difference between a proof of concept and something you want to build in production. If you do not make that distinction explicit, everything gets treated as if it is ready to ship.

Trap 2: The Accidental Commitment (All Surface, No Substance)

The frontend layer, what Frédéric calls L1 or the presentation layer, has a roughly 50% first-time completion rate in vibe coding. That is exceptionally high. Any idea you have pops off, gets a nice layout, and looks clean. And 90% of what management wants is L1-oriented: the visual stuff. If you can prove a point visually, you are the hero because within minutes you can produce a mockup that looks solid.

infoThe High

Everything feels polished. Proof of concepts go through. You have demo euphoria. The demo gods love you. You are a rainmaker who can sell anything to management, to sales, to anyone who is watching.

warningThe Crash

Below the frontend, database access completion drops to 20%. Infrastructure is even worse at 10%. Trying to fix the infrastructure costs nine times more than the frontend work did. You are just an empty suit. All show and no substance. A snake oil salesman.

The practice: make sure you have explicit acceptance criteria in every prompt, from top to bottom, covering backend, database, and infrastructure. It goes slower, but you have to make sure that your feature gets tested from the get-go, from the moment you define your specs. Not just the surface layer.

Trap 3: Speed (The Rework Math That Eats Your Timeline)

Speed kills quality. In the research data, developers were making many more meaningful decisions per hour. Think 60 features across 20 dev hours, a 10x decision output. Everybody was watching and thinking it was amazing. The velocity felt unstoppable.

warningThe Crash

55% of all features needed correction. At 60 decisions with 55% needing a 15-minute correction each, that is at least 8 hours of rework for every sprint. Nearly half of delivery time went to fixing, not building. You are not a machine. You are just busy, burning energy without direction.

The practice: iteration caps. If something does not work the first time, try again. If it does not work a second time, try a third. But do not go down the rabbit hole of fixing something 20 times. Cap yourself on the number of iterations you spend on a single thing. If it is not possible in three passes, accept it as a limitation, not a loss. Otherwise you will spend all your energy on something that is purely scope creep and not even useful to build.

Trap 4: Cocaine (The Confidence Problem)

Everything feels possible. Demo time collapses. Velocity is great. You are unstoppable. You believe you are God, that everything you want to build can get built in days. That feeling only existed in the very early beginnings, and now vibe coding brings it back.

But nothing is connected. Scope creep is everywhere. It is a pure illusion of speed through confidence. You are moving way too fast without seeing what is on fire. You have no clue whether the frontend is connected to the backend, whether the infrastructure is linked to the data. You do not even look. You just go that fast.

The data backs this up. An 82% isolation rate means that whatever developers test for the first time, 80% is tested in pure isolation, without looking backward or forward into infrastructure or frontend. Almost all regressions happen in the presentation and logic layers simply because testing happens in isolation, not connected. Reversible actions fail to trigger deep validation: if it is reversible, nobody cares. But the ups and downs destabilize the team, and the velocity is built on untested assumptions.

The practice: regular checkpoints. If something can break and is not reversible, completely slow down and check thoroughly. If it is reversible, do some checks. If it is truly irreversible, have somebody else review the code. Blind spots are biggest at peak confidence.

Trap 5: Ketamine (Delegation Without Comprehension)

This may be the hardest trap of them all. The math seems to work out: an 80-90% reduction in dev time. You complete 13 dev days in 25 minutes. You have saved almost 8,000 hours across 127 projects. At the high, you feel like a leader. You do not need to understand the details. You just set the vision and all agents and people will do it for you.

warningThe Crash

You have no clue who built it, how it works, how to fix it, or how to resolve issues. You cannot explain it to anybody. Fixes take much longer than the original plan to execute. New requirements surface unexpected constraints because you have no idea how everything is actually connected.

The practice: synthetic friction. Do not get detached from the actual development, even if it is vibe coding. Stay highly aware of the direction of what the agent or person is building. If you do not, one week, one month, six months later, nothing will make sense to you anymore. And you are still the master, still the boss of your own product. If you are no longer mentally connected with your product, only huge challenges will come in the future.

Why Deeper Layers Degrade

Across all five traps, the same pattern repeats: the deeper you go, the worse vibe coding performs on first-pass completion. The frontend presentation layer sits around 50%, database access drops to 20%, and infrastructure falls to just 10%. The reason is straightforward. Surface layers give immediate visual feedback, so you see what is wrong. Deeper layers encode assumptions silently, and by the time something surfaces, four other layers already depend on it.

Every button in your frontend has an action, a table, some data related to it. If you do not take that into account from the beginning, the layers below will not do anything according to your original assumptions. And the longer you wait, the harder it becomes to make sense of it or fix it.

The Disciplined Approach: When Constraints Unlock Speed

The talk was not anti-AI. Frédéric builds with AI every day. The point is that the tool amplifies whatever you bring to it. When the research measured the disciplined approach (constraints up front, explicit acceptance criteria, gating on irreversible decisions) the numbers improved dramatically.

More than 100% first-pass completion improvement in the deeper layers when constraints were defined up front
76% fewer corrections per feature when using acceptance criteria from backend to infrastructure
23% additional improvement when using gating, meaning fully stopping and testing before any irreversible decision

The practices that keep you grounded: checkpoint-based validation after every meaningful generation, iteration caps to prevent rabbit holes, separation of exploration from commitment, and synthetic friction to stay connected to what you are building. Frédéric distilled it into one rule: if it is visible, you can move fast. If it is silent, slow down. If it is irreversible, gate it.

The Choice Is Yours

Five traps, five highs, five crashes. The temptation is still there. But the good thing is: we are all product managers. If we know what we are choosing, we do not need the temptation at all. We always choose wisely, we think about the consequences before taking anything. That does not mean ignoring the possibilities. It means doing everything together in a very conscious way.

“AI accelerates EVERYTHING, especially our mistakes, and ideally also our successes. Make sure we do it in a proper way.”
- Frédéric Pattyn

Checkpoints make you move faster with more confidence, with a better balance between the good and the bad. The trap is not the tool. The trap is believing the tool replaces the need to think.

The Vibe Coding Trap

Download the Slides

The Relationship: Honeymoon, Comedown, Temptation

Trap 1: Wheat (Explore Everything, Commit to Nothing)

infoThe High

warningThe Crash

Trap 2: The Accidental Commitment (All Surface, No Substance)

infoThe High

warningThe Crash

Trap 3: Speed (The Rework Math That Eats Your Timeline)

warningThe Crash

Trap 4: Cocaine (The Confidence Problem)

Trap 5: Ketamine (Delegation Without Comprehension)

warningThe Crash

Why Deeper Layers Degrade

The Disciplined Approach: When Constraints Unlock Speed

The Choice Is Yours

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