Part 1: Why Vibe Coding Breaks Down Last month, I spent an afternoon building a URL shortener with Claude. The first prompt worked beautifully. Code appeared. Tests passed. I felt like a wizard. By the fifth prompt, things got weird. The AI added features I did not ask for. It changed the database schema twice. It could not remember what the API endpoints were supposed to be. By the tenth prompt, I was not coding. I was negotiating with a machine that had forgotten the conversation we had twenty minutes ago. This is not a failure of AI. This is the failure of the method. Most of us use AI the same way we use a search engine: we ask for something, we get an answer, we move on. That works for recipes and trivia. It does not work for building software. Because AI has a hidden limit. Not a technical limit — a structural one. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. In this series, I will show you that limit. Then I will show you a simple way around it. The solution is not a better prompt.…