You generated a feature in thirty seconds using Claude. It compiled. You deployed it. Then something broke in production.
Now you're staring at an error traceback, and you realize something terrifying: you have no idea what the code actually does.
This is called "vibe coding," and it's the defining trap of learning to code in the age of AI. You can generate working code instantly. But when it breaks, you're completely lost. You can't debug what you don't understand.
The instinct is to paste the error into Claude or ChatGPT and run whatever it suggests. That's the wrong move. It leads to a cycle of patches stacking on patches until your codebase becomes unmaintainable. You need a different approach.
Why Debugging AI Code Is Different
