Bill Cypher on Nostr: Some people have success vibe coding and others get burned or fail miserably. I think ...

Some people have success vibe coding and others get burned or fail miserably. I think it is because vibe coding is a skill of its own. I wrote this as my guide to vibe coding successfully as someone who has been doing it since before I ever heard the name.

I'll add a couple of points that I left out because other commenters in the thread had mentioned them.

1. Use a flat fee AI not a pay as you go model.
2. Use a proper version control to keep track of your changes. You WILL fuck up and need to go back to a previous version.

quoting nevent1q…e3e9

I'm not sure what your approach is. I get the best results by only letting the AI work on one function or class at a time. "Edit the codebase to add this feature" type prompts always lead to trouble.

1. Goals of program.
2. Let's design a skeleton of the program, what functions will we need to hit those goals?
3. Now we write fully isolated function by function. Make sure you understand and document each function thoroughly when it is written.
4. Test and integrate each function as you go.

You also iterate over that for each feature add. A new feature is a change to the program goals, which updates your skeleton, which causes function edits and new functions, which get tested and added 1 by 1.

LLMs love to be super helpful and run ahead. Force them to slow down to your pace. If you lose sight of where they went you can't effectively prompt any more.

Not a Dev and never was, but I have vibe coded projects in production now. One of my vibe code jobs has completely replaced a prior version written by a dev because it is more stable, updateable, and flexible.

The model in my head is I am now the project manager walking a junior dev through a project they cannot grasp the big picture of.