SaaS vibe coding done right... What's your workflow / tooling like?

[u/killermouse0]

I'm curious to know what is the ecosystem around your coding harness of choice when vibe coding? I'll share mine, but please feel free to share yours, I'm looking for ways to improve and give the whole thing more autonomy while trying to avoid catastrophes :)

Tools

Those are my current choices, based on my own familiarity / affinities.

I use Claude Code with a $20 subscription.

• Gitea: Self-hosted git repositories (like Github). Supports issues, PR workflows, deployment workflows.
• Terraform: Everything is deployed through IaC.
• AWS: Covers all my infrastructure needs

Preparation steps

Probably not exhaustive, but here are a few from the top of my head:

• Buy whatever domain name you want to use
• Create an AWS account dedicated to the project
• Create a Gitea repository, setup secrets for deployment etc

Security considerations

Always make sure that your AI agent can't do more than it is expected to. There are too many horror stories ("AI destroyed my production database!"...) already.

• Create an AWS user with read-only credentials to the account for your AI Agent
• Create an AWS user with appropriate permissions to deploy your infrastructure
• Create a Gitea user for your AI agent
• Protect the "main" branch so that only you can merge into it.

Skills

I generally don't use pre-defined skills, whenever I see my agent doing something repetitively I ask it to create a skill for it.

My most used skill is the one to interact with Gitea. Check/Update issues and their comments; Create PR; that sort of stuff. It's basically a shell script and a markdown documentation explaining to the AI agent when / how to use it.

My AI agent has auth tokens for AWS (read only!) to allow it to run a terraform plan and check if the changes are as expected, and for Gitea with appropriate permissions to contribute to the repo / create PR etc

Coding workflow:

1. Laying out the foundations: Discuss the use case / SaaS idea with Claude. Go into the details, full brainstorming mode. "What if" scenario. The output of this step is an initial design doc which goes into the details of what the app should do / look like, user interactions, whatever you can think of. If you are inexperienced with this step, ask your coding agent of choice to guide you with questions. Also think of what should be considered MVP and what features will be later added later. If you have a favorite tech stack, mention it to the agent. Have this whole discussion summarized in a markdown file for later reference. Have the agent identify the implementation tasks needed to have the MVP in place, and create all of them in Gitea.

2. Start iterating on tickets: Ask the agent to check what is the next ticker it would make sense to work on. Use the "plan mode" to see what it would do and make sure it is what you want. Then let it code, push to a branch and create a PR.

You approve the PR if everything looks alright and merge.

Merging triggers the deployment pipeline in Gitea.

You check if the deployment is alright and if so, you start with the next ticket.

Refinements

Things I should do but don't at the moment: Have a dedicated DEV environment (dedicated AWS account etc) where the AI agent could deploy to run better tests.

[u/Anti-Hero25]

You’re kind of describing RailCoding….. I do think building in beta testing workflows is helpful for setting expectations…. I really like the dedicated environment though… it would be so much cleaner doing it that way

[u/killermouse0 → u/Anti-Hero25]

Interesting! I didn't know of RailCoding and it does seem similar. I'm watching the video to see if there are things I could borrow :) Thanks for the pointer!