notes

Vibe Coding

How to avoid costly errors

  1. Delegate throughtfully: Choose well defined, smaller tasks where success criteria are clear and verifiable.
  2. Supervise appropriately: Monitor more closely when the task is novel, complex or high impact.
  3. Establish guardrails: Create explicit boundaries for what AI should and shouldn’t modify.
  4. Check work regularly: Verify output to catch issues early, especially for critical system components.
  5. Create persistent references: create documentation that helps your AI assistant understand your project and references.

Important Skills

  1. Creating Fast and Frequent Feedback Loops
  2. Creating Modularity - principle that allows different parts of a system to operate and evolve independently
  3. Embrace Learning
    • Expert coaching - leverabe mentors, peers, and AI itself
    • Fast feedback - build those tight verification loops to immideately see results of the AI work and your prompts
    • Intentionall practice
    • Challenging tasks - push yourself slightly beyond your comfort zone, using AI for problems you couldn’t solve alone yesterday
  4. Master Your Craft

The Vibe Coding Loop

  1. Frame your objective: Give a clear, concise overview of what outcome you’re aiming for. Be specific about what success looks like and why you’re building it.
  2. Decompose the tasks: Break down what you’re trying to do in to clear, achievable steps. The smaller the steps the better. Use help from AI to break down big tasks into small units.
  3. Start conversation: Ask AI to generate a plan for complext tasks, or immideately start for small tasks. Do not over complicate, it shouldn’t be a perfect prompt as for chat based application, you can always iterate.
  4. Review with care
  5. Refine and iterate
  6. Automate your own workflow: Begin automating away chunks of your workflow. Any friction creates huge oppotunity cost. And any time you spend typing or copying/pasting slows down your vibe coding loop.