The Problem
You vibed something useful. It works, the demo is good, the call went well. The ask comes back: productionize this. The person doing the productionizing is not you.
Most vibe-coding guidance treats hardening as an activity you do later. The reality, especially in companies that ship a lot of AI features, is that vibe code passes from a vibe-builder to a senior engineer who didn't watch it being made. That handoff is where the rewrite-or-keep decision gets made — and where most of your work either survives or doesn't.
Vibe in a way that doesn't burden the rewriter. The cost of that discipline at vibe-time is small. The cost of skipping it is that your output gets thrown away.
The Core Insight
The rewriter's first job is to understand what the code is doing and why. Anything you leave behind that helps that step survives. Anything you leave behind that obscures it costs you.
Three things help the rewriter, in this order:
- The decisions you made and why — not what the code does, which they can read.
- The dead ends you ruled out — so they don't re-explore.
- Structure that's easy to break apart — so they can rewrite a slice without touching the rest.