debugging

3 articles · newest first

Realistic painterly illustration of a lone figure at a fork in a trail at dusk, one path overgrown and tangled, the other a clean fresh road ahead

When to start over vs fix: stop patching a tangle

Lesson 4 of talking to it well: the vibe coder's trap is prompting patch-on-patch until the code is a knot. When a fresh spec beats a fifth fix, shown with a real before-and-after.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 5 min

Isometric diorama of a small workbench where a draft page moves under a magnifying glass and comes out stamped with a green check, arrows looping back to the start

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The verify loop: the first answer is a draft, not a verdict

Lesson 2 of talking to it well: the habit that separates vibe coders who ship safe apps from those who ship bugs. Generate, then make the model attack its own answer, shown with a real before-and-after.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 5 min

Isometric diorama of a small monitoring desk with a screen showing a scrolling list of log lines, one highlighted in red, and a magnifier beside it

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What is an error log? The first place to look when it breaks

Lesson 1 of when it breaks: when your vibe-coded app suddenly fails, this is the first place to look. What an error log is, how to read one, and why "it just broke" almost never means that.

Sam Ortega · 1h ago · 4 min