My OSS Stalled for 3 Months Because of Misguided Vibe Coding—This Is the Full Reboot Story

A developer shares their experience recovering from a 3-month project stall on diffx, a structured-data diff tool. The root causes included monorepo complexity, over-sharing CI/CD infrastructure across multiple projects, premature multilingual documentation, and quality issues from AI-assisted "vibe coding" without proper verification. The recovery process involved quarantining existing code, manually verifying functionality, writing specs from scratch, rebuilding tests based on specs rather than implementation, and splitting the monorepo into separate language-specific repositories. Key lessons include the importance of spec-driven development with AI, two-stage release workflows, and having the courage to delete broken artifacts rather than clinging to sunk costs.