10 things I learned writing 49,000 words about vibe coding
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A developer advocate shares 10 practical lessons from a 31-day experiment building a real production app (collectyourcards.com) entirely with Claude Code. Key insights include: treating yourself as the architect and AI as a junior dev, writing full specs instead of vague prompts, breaking features into phases, committing before every AI operation, using a CLAUDE.md config file to persist context, explicitly demanding security and edge case handling, relying on observability instead of manual code review, using AI to review AI with multiple focused passes, honestly measuring productivity gains (which were smaller than expected), and maintaining documentation to compensate for AI's lack of memory between sessions.
Table of contents
1. You’re the architect. AI is the junior developer.2. Write specs, not prompts.3. Break every feature into phases.4. Commit before every AI operation.5. Configure your AI once, not every conversation.6. AI builds for the happy path. You have to demand the rest.7. Observability replaces manual code review.8. Use AI to review AI.9. Measure whether it’s actually helping.10. Document what you learn, because AI won’t remember (yet).How I changed over 31 daysSort: