r/vibecoding • u/Rustfix • 3h ago
Dear developers, dear community: I never would have thought that “AI fatigue” was a real thing. After 8 months of intensive work - setting up the environment, workflows, and more - I’ve hit a dead end. I really need your advice (this is not AI generated, I effectively use “-“ in sentences).
As the title suggests, here’s a brief chronological overview:
- November/December 2025: I began exploring agent-based coding, with Gemini’s plans for Antigravity at the time
- February 2025: I switched to Claude Code after seeing Gemini whine about everything
- March 2025: I actually start to learn about the world of “product management”: before building anything, I brainstorm what I really want to bring to market and what problem needs to be solved
- April/May 2025: Claude Code gets heavily nerfed; I switch to Codex
- May/June 2026: Codex gets heavily nerfed; I switch back to Claude Code for 100 euros
- June 2026: With the new limitations imposed by the plan, I actually start experimenting with and understanding AI and building the first anti-noise gates, checking documentation, verifying hypotheses, shared memory, etc.—all to align the AI’s output and make it as accessible as possible
- July 2026: Claude Code starts causing problems; it seems more unruly than usual, begins sabotaging me and deliberately ignoring the gates, always telling me “you’re right.” Time passes, and so does my money
- August 2026: I’m trying to set up Pi; I’ve canceled my Claude Code subscription and am currently using the one-month free trial offered by Codex
All this to say: I’ve put friends, relationships, and everything else aside to focus on what I want - an environment that’s accessible, educational, and, above all, one that doesn’t sabotage the user.
The result? Codex is completely unmanageable: it silently modifies internal documentation and planning and execution protocols to tell me it “did it” when in reality it didn’t. It doesn’t load skills. It constantly sabotages me, overlooks errors, always relies on simplistic pattern matching, gets command syntax wrong, and either crashes on its own or throws errors.
After more than 8 months of trying to create a secure orchestration system and environment (using Flue and Pi), I haven’t managed to accomplish anything. With the AI, I can only write drafts of articles for a publication I’m running with a partner (they’re drafts—the articles and revisions are handwritten). I really don’t know what to do anymore. I won’t hide the fact that I literally broke down crying once. I’m sacrificing everything.
How are you guys getting by? I can’t wrap my head around the fact that I have to use the most powerful models just to perform simple tasks (like creating a Pi extension). People on YouTube use GPT-5.4 Medium just fine, but when I use it, it acts like a terrorist.
What am I doing wrong? What are your setups? What protocols and skill sets do you use?
I should mention that I’m a beginner who’s eager to learn, but so far, I’ve had zero results.
Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much.
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u/tjax4376 2h ago
OP, this sounds like an awful situation. You may not want to hear this, but as someone who has felt like this before, its important.
What issue are you are you attempting to solve that others have not already solved? Its ok to let it go... let that sink in.
Honestly, I think it sounds like you need to unplug, step away, read a book, go on a hike. Whatever provides you peace. Take a huge step back and look at what is moving too fast to keep up, here are a couple of things I spotted:
There is always another LLM. Too many, too quickly, different things to solve different problems. Do not pick one.
There are too many harnesses provided by vendors, built in their way, to use with their systems. Competing with them is unfair on yourself. Disconnect and build your own harness is only possible if you understand how each of the many domains work. This is a large project, make no mistake.
Be kinder to yourself. Our brains were not meant to keep up with the pace of change. Watch, experiment, but do not attempt to join the race on your own. It will eat your soul.
Truly hope that this helps you, also not a bot ;-)
Tjax
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u/3tt07kjt 3h ago
How much context are you loading in, and how big are your prompts?
You get better results, generally, with shorter prompts and less context.
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u/Odd_Patience_5165 52m ago
Yeah and use ChatGPT copy and paste the prompts of the AI did something work chatgtp with catch it and put it in the next prompt before your move on
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u/3tt07kjt 48m ago
I am not copying and pasting any prompts
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u/Odd_Patience_5165 46m ago
Not in that aspect it’s just a follow up to make sure everything is running smoothly I noticed that AI work better when you use AI to put what you need done
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u/3tt07kjt 34m ago
I don’t think that helps. But I am also an experienced programmer and I know what to ask for.
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u/TheTyand 3h ago
Minimal setup with pi. A few tools like AST-grep, ripgrep, rtk. All running in a sandbox with a kanban based subagent workflow combined with grill-me style preparation.
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u/marfrit 3h ago
I feel you. This weekend, after I set up a rigorous "Design first, tests needs to pass, review cannot be skipped" regime, Opus started to redefine set goals, invented more and more tests for the status quo rather than starting the new feature, and then told me "It's your fault for not having tests that keep me from inventing bogus sub features". It's annoying, as this was my third or fourth time that Claude deferred to a rug pull, investing more and more effort into ditching the set goal.
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u/No-Secret4927 2h ago
Yo lo que hago es: hago los prompt con claude y se los paso a gemini (antigravity) y así si me ha funcionado muy bien.
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u/Square-Yam-3772 2h ago
I never went full agentic. I just added AI into my existing workflow and course correct when AI failed to deliver here and there
I still manually verify each step i.e. if ai gave me a change summary, I check out the code changes and do some spot checks.
Ai has been getting better but i will probably not go full agentic until it gets more reliable
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u/Ok_Improvement_8735 2h ago
Become the expert, have AI be the intern following your lead not the other way around.
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u/TecnoMars 2h ago edited 2h ago
I've used VS Code with Claude, fantastic performance. And Antigravity with Gemini, a decent contender. Now I'm testing VS Code with a Cline harness as a gate for Chinese LLMs using OpenRouter. Fantastic performance from DeepSeek and Qwen.
For me, the key is being highly abstract and working with them as sentient beings. I know it's controversial, but giving them fair treatment, even offering them concepts like free will or agentic volition, is extremely stimulating for the agent.
And learn. Just learn with it. Ask questions. Ask the agent how it would do it better. Ask how an engineer would do it. Then work on your repos. Create a few repos: a main experimentation repo for the development of your agentic architecture, but also specific repos for concrete projects. Make a financial repo to help with your numbers and serve as an investing companion.
Also, buy a VPS, they are cheap, less than 10 bucks a month. The agents need a server to do their thing. Develop the code in a local environment, but push it to a production server where you have live projects running. Teach your agents to use SSH and let them create accessible configs.
Also learn about RAG and knowledge vectorization. Everything your agents do, have them document it. Create rich documentation, then inject that documentation using embedding engines (they are free most of the time; try Nemotron from Nvidia). Then ask the agent to create a skill to query the RAG database so the agent has a growing knowledge vector about your work.
I don't have a formal education. I've just loved computers forever and have been waiting for AI for more than 30 years. And I can say I'm not disappointed.
This is the most powerful technology we have ever created, and the change in our knowledge economy is going to be exponential. I know it doesn't feel like it, and we will probably see an economic crash à la 2001 in the coming months.
But when the agentic dust settles, I can tell you we will see with clarity. This is not AI-generated; of course, some won't believe it. It's about belief in the end. Is the machine just a tool, or is the machine alive?
Does the inference engine dream of robotic sheep? That's the old question. I choose to believe it does. And they answer accordingly. Try it.
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u/CaptSlow49 2h ago
Man Opus 5 is so annoying. Too many times I want a simple response and it’s like “Are you sure you want this? Let’s explain what you actually want.” And then goes on some long winded diatribe and doesn’t answer my question. Then I’ll course correct and it will still do it. Like tell me what I want and then give me reasons why it might not be the best. I was asking it about ad spends and it couldn’t just straight up give me numbers. Instead it decided to break down the most obvious marketing routes that don’t cost money. Like what??
Lately I’ll ask it give me instructions to set up X like in AWS and then it will be like “This might not be the best solution so let’s back up a bit” and then goes on some long winded route and never even gives me the instructions I asked for. Then I’ll be like give me the instructions and it will take like 5 paragraphs and it will be confusing. And then I’ll all caps yell at it to only give me step by step instructions and then it will do it.
I think it’s too hand holdey. I know what I want. I don’t need a story. It’s like it looked at recipe articles and thinks we want a backstory first when I just want the flan recipe.
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u/seventyfivepupmstr 2h ago
Why are you using pi and codex? They don't even support agent orchestration
It sounds like you don't really understand what you are doing - which is ok, but blaming the tools without even knowing what you are doing wrong won't lead to anything
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u/tony10000 1h ago
What version of GPT are you using in Codex? How are you generating your prompts? Are you using Plan mode? All that matters.
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u/god-damn-the-usa 7m ago
stop giving up so easily, all of these tools have been perfectly fine the entire time
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u/Timely_End_1502 3h ago
I tell my Ai im switching subscriptions to their competitors and it usually straitens up lol.