> I can get near miraculous results from vibe coding, but it often gets stuck in weird “bug loops” where it goes back and forth between broken states, and I have to understand either like bracket formatting, or be able to research library failures and conflicts.

In my experience this is mainly caused by a lack of investment in tests.

Vibe-coding excels when paired with test-driven development, because TDD approaches serve as validators and problem constrains. Often coding agents get stuck on but loops because they have neither context nor feedback on what represents a broken state. Tests fix both problems, and if you stop to add one then your bug loops quickly vanish.

So vibe coders need to know how to write tests? I doubt that lowers the effective barrier of entry to coding very much.

I assume you can't trust the LLM to write these tests, since you are writing tests so the LLM will stop it's bug loop...