Signs Your Codebase is Vibe-Coded

1. You need to grep to figure out where a function is used… and it’s used everywhere.

2. Comments like: // not sure why this works, but don’t touch it 😅

3. There are TODOs older than your dev interns.

4. Deploying feels like playing Russian roulette — even with “no changes.”

5. Functions named after what the dev was feeling: doItNow(), tempFix2(), final_final_handler()

6. Two people “fixed” the same bug in different files. Neither fix works anymore.

7. You rely on AI to “interpret” the codebase like it’s ancient scripture.

8. Tests? Oh, those were “planned” after MVP… 2 years ago.

9. Same function is implemented in 4 places. With 4 different bugs.

10. You have to manually clear cache files from 3 folders to run the project locally.

11. No documentation. Not even a README. Just a 12-minute voice note in Slack from 2022.

12. The frontend uses 3 CSS libraries. And jQuery. In 2025.

13. Refactoring one module breaks six others… and nobody knows why.

14. You find yourself saying, “It’s fine, it just needs a restart.”

15. The last person who worked on this repo now does pottery full-time.

16. There’s a main-final-clean-final-last.(js|py) in prod.

17. Environment setup instructions include: “Try restarting your computer. Twice.”

18. Nobody’s touched the CI/CD config in months. Because it’s “fragile.”

19. 8MB JSON logs printed to the console… every second.

20. Your staging server is actually prod. Nobody knows why.

If you nodded at least twice, I can help.