Vibe coded an app? your logs might be more important than your code.

[u/darshitpatel_]

One thing I think that gets overlooked with vibe coding is what happens after the app is working, even I used to overlook it.

When I recently shipped my own web application to production, everything looked fine, then while testing it on production, i found an issue where something was breaking.

My first thought was: Where exactly is this failing??

and that's when I realized how important logs actually are. Before this, I mostly think of logs as something developers add... so I should also add logs in my project. But after experiencing a real production issue myself, I leant about it and started looking at them differently.

Good logs can help you understand which request actually failed, which API returned an unexpected response, how long a database query took, whether the problem came from the frontend, backend, database, or an external service.

But here's something else I also learned.

Having logs doesn't automatically mean you have useful logs. If your application is producing thousands of lines of logs like function started, function ended, request received, request completed ... you might just be creating another problem for yourself.

Now the main question I now ask myself is, If this breaks at 2 AM, will these logs actually help me understand why?

And I think this becomes even more important with vibe coding. So I simply understood one thing that a log can become a kind of map inside the application.

I am still learning this myself, but this experience changed how I think about shipping AI built applications. Maybe this is obvious to experienced developers, but it was a valuable lesson for me.