4 weeks, full-time vibecoding: what I can share

Hey folks, Sumit here from the Himalayas. It has been a little over 4 weeks. I have got a flow that is working and a few thoughts I want to share if anyone is starting off. This is a work in progress and I am trying to keep my suggestions for a wide audience but some experience in building software products, not actual programming, will help.

A little background

• I am an experienced software engineer
• I have not touched maybe more than 200 lines of code in these last few weeks
• Vibe code exclusively, Claude Code, Google Jules and now Gemini CLI
• Working full-time on my product ideas, but mostly understanding this new way to build software

Before you start

• Make sure you have a local setup of the common tools, git, VS Code or any other editor
• Learn you way around your OSes terminal for Claude Code, Gemini CLI, etc.
• You may want to be able to run the generated code, backend, frontend and database on your computer
• For the above, you will need to install all needed software for your selected tech stack (see below)
• Remember that at each step of vibe coding, if you can test your software on your computer, you will have a lot of confidence
• Also, being able to copy/paste errors from your running application into the coding agents help a lot

Research and documentation

• A little research, use Claude.ai, Perplexity, simple web search, reading
• Ask chat agents what they feel should be the approach to build the solution you need
• Ask for high level technical stack, add your preferences if you have
• You can ask chat agents to write out the first couple tickets, mention you will pass these to coding agents
• Ask chat agents to break tickets into really small steps
• Read the tickets, try and understand how your solution is being converted into a technical spec
• Ask chat agent to create README.md and CLAUDE.md or GEMINI.md (or both if you use both) - first one is high level overview for everyone, second type of files if for the coding agents, still readable by everyone
• I use GitHub issues for my tickets, my code already resides on GitHub

Generating code

• It helps when you select the stack before actual vibe coding, at least language, frameworks, databases, how you will host, etc. (refer above)
• Start with tickets to start a simple "hello world" app for your tech stack, frontend, backend, API, database
• Test the generated app on your computer - this is important since you want to not end up with a lot of code full of problems, test at each step
• From here, proceed to express what you want the user experience to be, one small step at a time
• If you have tickets from chat agents, use them
• Write tickets for each step before you start, pass the ticket to coding agent (they can use GitHub client or access the issue URL for public projects)
• If something goes wrong, have a conversation with coding agent, paste errors, etc.
• Slow progress that builds software that you can actually use is better than generating a lot of useless code

This is just the start of a process. The important thing to note is that this is not that different than handing over tasks to an engineer. You may still need to do some research. The main difference here is cost and time. Code will be generated a lot faster and overall the process is a lot cheaper even with subscriptions to Claude or Gemini, etc.

Happy building!