When should you rewrite a vibe-coded app? Almost never.
Rewrites feel safer than refactors. They aren't. Here's the math on why we refactor 90% of the time.
Every founder we talk to asks the same question in the first 10 minutes: "should we just start over?"
The answer is almost always no. Rewrites take 3–6 months minimum, during which your app stops improving. Customers churn. The team that built v1 has all the institutional knowledge — and they're the ones you're firing by starting over.
Refactors keep the app shipping. PRs land daily. You can pause at any point. The team can read every change. And the cost is usually 20–40% of a rewrite for 80% of the benefit.
The only time we recommend a rewrite: when the data model is fundamentally wrong, or when the framework choice locks you out of the next two years of features. Even then, we usually do it incrementally — strangler-fig style — not as a big-bang.