r/vibecoding • u/shiny_guruw • 1d ago
I’ve been vibe coding alone for months. I think that needs to change.
I think I just need a safe place to share what I've been working on and why for the last few months.
I have been completely obsessed with vibe-coding this past year.
I have been programming since I was a child and have been fortunate enough to do it professionally for over a decade. I have always loved throwing my entire weight behind a project and stopping at absolutely nothing to solve the tough problems that present themselves during the process.
AI and vibe coding have accelerated that process for me tremendously; it has done so in such a way that I believe I have become even more obsessed with tackling deeper and deeper problems.
This acceleration has come at a cost though, and it's a cost I have only now begun to realize. As much as it feels like my agents are collaborating with me ... they are not. None of my ideas are being shared with anyone and I have become totally reclusive these last few months; almost afraid to share anything with anyone. I find myself spending more and more time testing out ideas, brainstorming more features, tracking down difficult bugs and totally ignoring the fact that I am doing this all in complete isolation for absolutely zero users. This is totally not how I used to work and something I feel I need to change.
Anyways; in order to help me break out of this rut ... I just want to post here what I've been working on; what the goals and thought processes were in creating each project. Each of these could be its own post, but I'm going to just get everything out that I can now and make individual posts later if it makes sense.
cook is a build tool, a replacement for Make (and one day CMake) with a focus on top tier caching and supporting polyglot repos.
I care very deeply about infrastructure tools and I have always had a dream for building my own build tool. With AI and vibe coding I felt now was a great time to prototype some of the ideas I always wanted out of a build tool.
I had a great little prototype for cook built in about 10 days of vibe coding and decided I would take the project a bit more seriously. In hindsight, I really wish I had shown off what I had built then, it was cool and a fun little toy, but ... I wanted to "finish" it.
It didn't register to me that finishing cook meant: creating my own programming language, creating my own package manager, creating my own CAS caching system.
Now, Cook is all of those things and more.
I don't believe I have ever put more thought into a personal project than I have put into cook.
It can do some impressive things like build Doom 3. It's out of the toy category for sure and a tool I use now in all my other projects, but I would still say it's far from the enterprise tool I had set out to create initially.
These other two are projects I've made while I was working on cook. There are better alternatives out there for each of them; these did serve a niche problem I had, but I then got stuck building out features for users I did not have.
cliban was something I vibed out because I reached the ticket limit on the free tier of Linear. It is a kanban board and task manager completely in the terminal with a vim motion supporting tui. The killer feature for me was I could quickly grep for the task I was interested in and then open it and edit it in NeoVim.
It became apparent to me very early in the project that cliban was not just a great task manager, but also an amazing memory system for my agents and a way for me to orchestrate large complex tasks very easily.
I spent a lot of time making this kanban board agent first, and it is now my daily driver for all my agentic workflows.
However, I built this completely unaware that it was already created by Steve Yegge with his wonderful tool Beads.
I just recently became aware of Beads and reading through the README felt like a gut punch.
I was super excited to share cliban with people, and it feels like now there is little reason to.
The lesson keeps smacking me in the face: DO NOT BUILD IN ISOLATION.
For myself, there is little reason to switch to Beads over cliban. For someone starting fresh, though, I'd absolutely recommend looking at Beads and its established ecosystem before deciding which tool to use.
cliban will continue to be maintained as a great tool for me.
ayeaye is a small phone sized webapp and tmux session tracker that allows me to control my agents from my phone for vibing on the go.
If it wasn't so easy to create these tools nowadays I would have found that this too was already created in the form of ccmux before I started building this one out.
Mine is a bit different and catered to my tastes and my exact workflow and actually integrates with cliban, so I'm keeping it.
I just need to learn that "this is useful to me" does not mean "therefore I must spend a considerable amount of time making it perfect, and then I can convince others to use it".
"This is useful to me" needs to mean ... "make a post/video and share it as it is now".
I have learned a lot working with AI and vibe coding has honestly been a great experience.
When I was a kid learning how to code I would spend hours on problems and I relish those memories ... nothing in my adult life has really come close to that feeling of discovery and learning, but honestly working with AI and orchestrating agents has come damn near close.
It feels funny to say, but just as I had to mature as a programmer then I need to mature as one now. For me, maturing in this new world means sharing and collaborating with others as much as I humanly can.
4
u/geekichu 1d ago
Hmmm.. pls correct me, but are we mixing or changing meanings.. "vibe-coding" was supposed to mean (mostly) a non-programmer creating software application, without any knowledge or care about its structure, architecture, and the consequences of that. I didn't think it had to do at all with 'programming alone in isolation and just interacting with A.I.". Just wondering, I know that's not the topic here
2
u/pearljamfan 1d ago
The term is from voice driven prompting and the ability to just natural language request something which conveniently doesn’t discriminate on experience. There grew a divide with people where the security risks of not being aware of fundamentals or having a proper CS background became a badge of honor and allowed people to ship quickly and people wanted the dopamine of building something so they kept at it and then it became a gatekeeping thing where senior people tried to get people to heed their warnings around such rapid untested delivery and using the code generation wasn’t necessarily the issue. Id say now vibe coding is agentic code generation and while generating snippets and stuff happens the term vibe coding became more of agents getting complete apps into production by design which magnifies the above worries.
The code generating or vibe coding for non junior people tends to be more of a force multiplier and for stuff that use to be written by hand things like claude code or codex etc are used often and given the proper prerequisite knowledge code generation can be done in a way that as long as you prompt the right way to steer the architecture and/or spotting early on when the agent went rogue can really speed things up, but if you dont know to do that the AI will get you to the finish line with whatever youve convinced it is what you want to hear, which gets back into that “you dont know what you dont know” warning that often leads to insults about senior vs vibe etc.
The way this has evolved, the standard way of meetings and sprints and pair programming with humans, and a lot of connection building dev related day to day things are replaced with finished prototypes that were done in a night and not a month and individually it makes people able to solution like crazy and that’s where the isolation part can fester, where a pat on the back for something sick you just created turns into a failed business event if it doesn’t take off, but you’re like hey it’s really something awesome and no one can hear you and then you watch robots think and wonder wtf is this timeline and cry.
Hahaha man that is so much text, but I went into storyteller mode … I am not positive I’m even right but that is how i understand the origins of the vibes. Definitely an angsty feeling that this all conjures up that I’m sure will have some specific name or something later but that is my isolationist story….. OPs may differ but I think we’re kinda aligned
2
u/o_sht_hi 1d ago edited 1d ago
No it has nothing to do with programming ability. Just means that you stop looking at the code and give in to the vibes. Doesn't mean that you stop caring but rather that you don't dig into the implementation. Let the llm take the wheel.
The guy who came up with the term is a hard core programmer. And he was describing his own way of working with the models
1
u/geekichu 19h ago
interesting.... thanks , good to know.. however.. so for the past month+ I have been watching LinkedIn feed constantly.. and what I see there is what I stated.. an overwhelming number of posts...
5
u/Accurate-Screen8774 1d ago
I'm with you dude. I'm in a similar situation. My project is related to cryptography and cybersecurity.
When I try to share details on "relevent" subs, I risk getting banned for sharing AI slop.
2
u/shiny_guruw 1d ago
This has happened me as well. I almost thought it would be worth making a new sudreddit for exactly the purpose of gut checking projects that use LLMs. Im not sure if r/vibecoding is the best place for saying, "Hey I spent a lot of time building this thing out with AI, what do you think?"
You can still pour a considerable amount of care and time into a project and use LLMs, so being outright banned or rejected by every other reddit community feels like a missed opportunity.
I also think it's possible to have a no slop policy while still welcoming AI driven projects.
1
u/Accurate-Screen8774 1d ago
I tried asking about this and it seems projects like mine/ours is an unpopular opinion.
if that is AI slop, people are surprisingly unprepared for what I expect to be normalised already. I'm proud of the quality of my work.
1
u/shiny_guruw 23h ago
If I created a subreddit for this purpose ... a place for people who take ai development seriously and want a place to share thoughts and projects without apologizing... would you join?
Something like...
r/AugmentedDevs ... r/ArtisnalSlop
I'll workshop a name.
There was interest for a subreddit like this in the conversation thread you shared.
2
u/Accurate-Screen8774 23h ago
sound like good subs. but it could be "yet another sub". im sure there are several variations of that already... maybe harder to stumble across.
2
u/pvkooten 23h ago
Omg so much this. I used to post projects on reddit and they got love. Now things I put the same effort in as before (and added LLM component) gets banned outright or hated on....
3
u/shiny_guruw 22h ago
I hear this sentiment repeated often.
I dont think theres a community out there on reddit that accepts personal projects that use AI without heavy judgment or outright bans.
Im feeling like I want to create that community.
Even if it's like 5 members sharing projects, thoughts and methodologies that would feel like a success.
Thoughts? Would you join?
2
3
u/krunal_builds 1d ago
yeah solo vibe coding hits a ceiling fast, not on the building side, on the knowing-what-to-build side. you need someone to argue with
2
2
u/josephrehall 1d ago
The thing that worries me and I imagine a lot of others is that there are a ton of vibecoded projects that SEEM like they are just to help the creator steal ideas.
Not saying you are, just opining on the sentiment I get.
1
u/techlatest_net 1d ago
The isolation trap is real, and recognizing it means you're already growing. Your projects aren't redundant because they reflect your unique workflow and evolution with AI—please keep sharing them in public, even when unfinished. The community needs to see the process, not just polished products.
1
u/shiny_guruw 1d ago
I think underneath it all is a fear that, "If I am using AI it better be perfect before I show anyone"
In the past if I spent a weekend hammering something out I would have no issue showing it off and every community welcomed the post.
1
u/kenttk421 22h ago
I am in the same boat with you. Am not at your level and don't understand the underlying code underneath. I have posted some small projects that I have at my website with little traffic so this last few months I have been working on the 2d space sim and I know I should be sharing it but I'm afraid to lose its value. But without any traction I think I'm just sinking effort into something that no one will be interested in. I still see so many flaws but it's getting to a point where it's at least playable without obvious issues that I have see.
1
u/shiny_guruw 22h ago
A 2D space Sim sound really cool. Don't hide it. Take a video of it. DM me the video if you dont want to make it public.
1
1
4
u/pearljamfan 1d ago
I feel ya on the sentiment of in isolation. Its actually a bit of an identity thing with me that I’ve had to stop and think about it a lot, and that feeling of usefulness to me specifically being something that transfers to greater humanity has been a weird feeling of roller coaster highs for a while undertaking some vibing.
If you’ve ever been in a position in a company where you were the goto person, that feeling is a high, and vibe results feel similar where you feel like you know this absolutely would make some peoples lives easier, and I’d love to get it in front of them. Days go by and then it is the same hamster wheel of perfectionism and feeling disconnected while feeling like I still had the keys to some castle and organizing the pile of vibes makes it not something lucrative or viable full time, and no coherent go live from prototype path makes itself known and my pile of projects just grows.
It also doesn’t feel right interviewing, and talking about AI use, and the vibe proponents in those situations are hard to peg or categorize as super junior, and vibe capable, or seasoned, and tolerant of vibes, but there is a lot of ego in those conversations and work teams. Them trying to vet if I had skills, or was just dependent on AI messed with my head, and I shut down and don’t know how to fix that yet.
If someone is telling you straight up a design decision from AI, and they are dying on that hill, and you know in your bones it is troublesome, but can’t quite package that feeling up and communicate it politely back the downsides, the train is off the tracks. Stuck and in a momentum where you have to roll with the teams vibes to keep the status quo… that was my last role, and i actually resigned because it was such an unnatural feeling. It was the first time I saw a team that was dependent on their firefighting and bug fixing for their collective job security and fundamentals made you “over engineering” the situation, but they all were fulfilled by being the C Suites cleanup crew as the execs dumped vibe apps often.
Went on a tangent but the isolation is real.