Inherited a Vibe-Coded Mess? Here’s What To Do In The First 48 Hours

You’ve just inherited a project that was supposed to be a “breakthrough” because it was built in record time using AI magic. Instead, you’re staring at a house of cards. It works – sort of – but every time you touch the code, something breaks in a completely unrelated corner of the system.

This isn’t just technical debt; it’s vibe coding gone wrong. Andrej Karpathy, who noted in early 2025 that programming is becoming more about guiding intention than writing syntax, was right about the shift. But for a production system, “guiding intention” without a pragmatic engineering safety net is a disaster.

As Wiktor Żołnowski, CEO of Pragmatic Coders, points out: “The idea of Clean Code was born from the fact that developers spend several times more time reading code than writing it. With AI, that ratio has shifted to dozens, if not hundreds, of times more time spent on reading and verifying.”

If you don’t take control now, this project will burn your budget and your team’s morale. You need a 48-hour rescue plan to stop the bleeding.

Table of Contents

Diagnosis: 8 red flags of a vibe-coded app

If you recognize more than three of these, you aren’t looking at a “quick refactor” – you’re in a rescue situation.

The testability gap: There is either no test suite or tests that “test nothing” (UI snapshots with no logic verification).
Ritualistic setup: The project won’t run without specific “magic” rituals (“It only works on my machine” or “You need exactly Node 18.17.2”).
Random dependencies: You find four different libraries doing the same thing because the AI “felt like it” at the time.
Blurred layer boundaries: The UI talks directly to the database, and business logic is scattered across components.
Observability vacuum: No meaningful logs, no metrics, and no error tracking like Sentry or OTel.
Security as an afterthought: Tokens in localStorage, zero input validation, and hardcoded API keys.
API contract guesswork: Backend and frontend “agree” on data formats by trial and error.
High bus factor: Only one person “knows how it works” (or thinks they do), while everyone else is just guessing prompts.

The core principle: Stabilize first, improve later

In a rescue, the “let’s rewrite it properly” trap is deadly. It usually just results in a new mess with a prettier name. Your goal for these 48 hours is to stop the bleeding and regain predictability.

The 48-Hour Rescue Protocol

Hours 0–4: Triage and guardrails

The first rule of rescue: Stop digging.

Scope freeze: No new features. Period.
Top 5 critical paths: Identify the processes that keep the business alive (e.g., login, payments, checkout). If these fail, the company loses money.
Set minimum observability: Plug in Sentry or a basic logging layer. You can’t fix what you can’t see.
Security audit: Locate where tokens/sessions are stored and ensure basic rate limiting is in place.

Hours 4–12: Visibility and reproduction

The “Stranger Test”: Ensure a new developer can start the project with a single command. Update the README with environment variables and runtime versions.
Map the flows: Create a minimal diagram of data movement between the frontend, backend, and external services.
Dependency risk list: Identify “weird” or critical libraries (especially for auth or payments) that lack tests.

Hours 12–24: Anchor tests and logic squashing

This is where you get the highest ROI. You aren’t aiming for 80% coverage; you’re building anchor tests.

Data validation: Define schemas for critical endpoints. Add request validation on the backend and “sanity checks” on the frontend.
10 critical tests: Write E2E tests for only those top 5 paths identified earlier.
Consolidate business logic: If logic is buried in the UI, pull it out into a dedicated service or module. One predictable place for “the truth.”

Hours 24–36: Module boundaries

Establish borders: Create clear folders for core, domain, or services. It doesn’t matter what you call them, as long as everyone knows where things “live.”
Unify errors: Implement a single error format from the backend and map them clearly to the UI. No more silent catch(e).
Fix high-cost anti-patterns: Remove duplicate fetches and implement basic retries for unstable external calls.

Hours 36–48: The pragmatic roadmap

After 48 hours, you must make a decision based on data, not intuition.

The triage report: Document what caused the chaos, the top 5 remaining risks, and what has been secured.
Refactor vs. Rewrite?:
- Rewrite if you can’t establish domain boundaries or if the technical debt cost is growing exponentially.
- Refactor if critical paths are stabilized and you can “carve out” architecture in stages while the business continues to deliver.

Accelerating the rescue: Your toolbelt

When acting fast, you need to “de-mystify reality” quickly. Use these simple diagnostics to cut debug time from hours to minutes:

JSON sanity checks: Use formatters and diff tools to verify API payloads. If the frontend sees undefined, verify the types (e.g., "123" vs 123) and check for missing fields.
JWT debugging: Decode session tokens to check exp, iat, and scopes. Many “random logout” issues are just misconfigured TTLs or audiences.
URL & query params: Decode redirect URLs to see actual parameters. Catch double-encoding errors (%252F vs %2F) that break SSO or OAuth loops.
Regex filtered logs: Logs are often a mess. Build regex patterns to cut out the noise and identify real error patterns in stack traces.
SQL formatting: If performance is tanking, format the queries to see hidden joins or missing indexes.

Regain control of your product

Inheriting a vibe-coded app isn’t a death sentence, but it requires an engineering mindset shift: from “trying until it works” to “knowing why it works.”

At Pragmatic Coders, we specialize in pulling products out of these technological swamps. Our vibe coding rescue service is business decision to regain predictability. Whether we’re performing an architectural overhaul or stabilizing a failing production line, we bring the human expertise that AI-generated prototypes lack.

Don’t let technical debt dictate your roadmap. Let’s get your product back on solid ground.