How to Keep Death Loops From Happening
Vibe code tools like Bolt or Replit are fantastic for building a great prototype application quickly. You can get an MVP app up and running fast using these and other no-code platforms.
However, as your applications get bigger, you’ll run into a frustrating issue: the AI assisting you can lose context about the application itself and will start giving you error loops, or “death loops” — when changes break things that were previously working.
Here’s How to Fix an Error Loop
The key to fixing this is to guide the AI to build its own change management system for your project.
Seriously, just tell it to do build it’s own change management system.
Once you have your app outlined (use our free PRD tool for this) and the first version is built, instruct the AI to go through and check all the dependencies within the application and mark those down. Crucially, make sure it builds a changelog (this instruction is automatically included when you use our PRD tool) so that it can go back and reference previous states and alterations.
Set all this up by having the AI do the work for you, but make sure you ask it questions to confirm it understands how to manage the changes effectively based on the system it created.
Then comes the ongoing part.
Remind The AI to Reference the Changelog Every. Single. Time.
Every single time you go to make a change to your application, you need to explicitly tell the AI to reference the change management process it established.
It might feel a little tedious to say this over and over again, we are very aware that it’s tedious. But while some platforms might allow you to give the AI a prompt to store and reference a process every time, they can still forget. And dealing with these kinds of errors after they occur are even more tedious.
So, just add it to your mental checklist: every single time you approach a change, first tell the AI to reference its process and remember everything about what you’ve built. Only then should you have it go through and make the specific changes you need.
If you follow this method, you’ll likely find that your development process becomes much smoother. You can avoid that constant, frustrating loop of trying to fix something that was working just a few minutes ago but is now inexplicably broken.
Hope you find this helpful! If you need more help with your no-code projects, contact us.
