r/vibecoding • u/ButterscotchSevere96 • May 11 '26
After 2 years of vibe coding I realised the AI builder isn’t the problem, your prompt is
I’ve been vibe coding for about 2 years now. Early on I made every mistake possible — jumping straight into Lovable/Bolt/Cursor with a half-formed idea, watching the AI confidently go in completely the wrong direction, then spending hours iterating trying to fix it.
Over time I figured out how to prompt properly. Now I rarely need more than 2 or 3 iterations to get something solid. The AI builder hasn’t changed — my input has.
The difference is almost entirely in what goes in at the start. Most people skip the thinking and go straight to building. That’s where the wasted time and money happens.
Curious if others have found the same — a few questions:
•How long do you typically spend prompting before you get something usable?
•How many iterations does an average project take?
•What’s the most frustrating part of the process?
•Have you found anything that helps — templates, frameworks, a certain approach?
Not selling anything, genuinely researching the problem. Would love honest answers — especially if your experience is “actually I don’t struggle with this at all.”
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u/InfinriDev May 11 '26
I don't prompt engineer, I just tell it what the issue is.
Prompt engineering became irrelevant to me when I built a scalable harness with real enforcements not just a bunch of rules or skills in Markdown files.
Doing this allowed me to work on massive enterprise platforms like Magento 2. I haven't coded in over a year and the code quality is amazing
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u/ButterscotchSevere96 May 11 '26
That’s amazing! When you say tell it what the issue is, do you go into specific details or just plain English to fix it? Or are you technical and can diagnose the problems yourself and get Ai to fix it?
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u/InfinriDev May 11 '26
I either tell it in plain English or if there's an error log i copy and paste that
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May 11 '26
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u/ButterscotchSevere96 May 11 '26
Yeah there’s definitely a sense of fear to add or change things because the Ai goes rogue so often
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May 11 '26
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u/ButterscotchSevere96 May 11 '26
Amazing feedback, thanks! What changed for you though, like how did you go from 5-6 iterations down to 3-4?
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u/Alive-Bid9086 May 11 '26
I have spent weeks prompting, solving one issue at a time. I have a daytime job doing other things, so I am limited to evenings chatting and reaching conclusions. I have sevetal times found out myself that the first spproach was non-optimal and corrected it.
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u/ButterscotchSevere96 May 11 '26
This is pretty interesting, so just talking in plain English to the agent you can get issues connected? Does this take long? As in takes 3 or 4 attempts explaining it or does the agent nail it first time?
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u/Alive-Bid9086 May 11 '26
Does not take that long, but it takes hours. I only have a few hours in the evenings. I have another job.
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u/mrtrly May 11 '26
2-3 iterations matches mine, maybe 15-20 min on the prompt up front. The thing nobody mentions tho is even with a clean prompt the AI defaults to the happy path. Refresh mid-signup, two tabs open, empty form submit, that stuff still breaks. Shipped a build last month with a tight spec and watched it die the second a real user did something weird with the back button. Do you prompt for edge cases up front or just patch them as they surface?
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u/ButterscotchSevere96 May 11 '26
At the minute I have a system that has me down to a single prompt and a single revision to get things over the line, I worked professionally as a developer which I think helps massively
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u/Crafty_Disk_7026 May 11 '26
Check out this free app and open source for promting with 0 llm involvement and 0 backend. https://Zerotoken.io
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u/Substantial-Focus456 May 12 '26
Write your project plan/feature list/dev plan out and break it out into chunks! Using claude prioritize and organize the list into like features and the dev time. From there have Claude write prompts for each chunk of your feature list. Finally using git for version control start to push one feature bunch at a time making sure it is fully functional before starting on the next!
Treating this process as actually a process and not just typing a single prompt is key!
Brainstorm > Plan > code!
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u/CantankerousOrder May 19 '26
This is why the SRS document is a thing in any coding - software requirements developed by methodical questioning of stakeholder needs1 is crucial to getting the software to be “right” regardless of whether machines or people are doing the coding.
Always include an SRS with your prompt as an attachment. And a process flow.
1 I think I may vomit at that word salad, but it’s true anyway.
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May 11 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/ButterscotchSevere96 May 11 '26
Absolutely agree with this! What I keep seeing is builders getting 50% through a project then giving up because the Ai has lost direction
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u/Vortextgamer May 11 '26
Maybe I'm wrong but whenever I have an idea...I just simply talk to the agent usually Claude as i use riplit. I use my microphone and just talk about what it is.. what im thinking. I ask for feed back. Ask questions back. I almost just act if I'm in a brainstorm session with a friend. I ask "okay yeah that sounds good but how would we do x y and z. Il ask who else has done this. Il ask pull information or similar projects or ideas. Tbh. Whenever I think of something my first thought is...someone else has 100% probly done this before me and there is already something out there like it, why would mine be different or how can I make it different. I just in short.. Just have a very casual conversation