I'm sorry. Programming maintainable applications is fucking complicated. I don't think you can do it with Vibe Coding. It's hard enough to do the right way... Definitely AI can help you, but you have to know what is going on and how things actually work.
Discussion
You need an ai to write the code…
Then you need ai to check that code…
And finally you write the code yourself….
But it's WAY too easy to let the AI get ahead of itself, move too fast, do too much, until you have dug a hole that takes tons of time to dig out of.
Hence the last part where you just write the code yourself
Oh yea… I’ve def seen this … But TBH, for some people the vibe sketchout is an important part of the development process. nostr:npub1u5njm6g5h5cpw4wy8xugu62e5s7f6fnysv0sj0z3a8rengt2zqhsxrldq3 👀
And no harm in rebuilding again from scratch … if and when you’re ready…. and maybe incrementally? But it likely will take a complete rewrite to get to a state of maintainable code.
Can’t say that it’s more or less work than otherwise, though. Just different.
In the very near future, we’ll be able to ask AI to take a messy repo and make it maintainable, and it’ll do it and do it well. I don’t know how long this will take, but probably sooner than we think.
If you want to vibe code a maintainable project, you need to spend the first month chatting to outline a good codebase structure before you ever write your first line. Unless you know what you want to do and basic knowledge of your general purpose language, AI will only help you make slopware that never sees production.
On the other hand, it's an invaluable tool for weighing all the possible options in how to do what you want. For instance, it's great if you want a comparison of all the ways you can make configurations for your project. Or a comparison of database options. But if you just go in and let it decide things like this from the get go, you're going to have a very hard time maintaining it when you get to a thousand lines and realize you would rather use a SQL instead of a document store or a yaml instead of an env.
You have to know what to tell the AI to build. If you don't mention tailwind, your gunna get a shitload of