53 sessions in. Live product. No spaghetti.
Here is what actually keeps a vibe coded project from falling apart.
AI adds fast and never refactors. Every session it layers on top of whatever exists. Structure debt compounds invisibly until touching one thing breaks three others. That is not a vibe coding problem.
That is an architecture ownership problem.
Three things that kept it clean:
One change at a time. Smoke test after every deploy. Two site outages taught us this the hard way.
A living spec document. Claude Code reads it before every session. No drift. No re-explaining decisions made three weeks ago.
The builder owns the architecture. Always. The AI executes inside it.
The speed came from the AI. The structure stayed ours.
What is the biggest mistake you have made letting AI drive a build?