Vibe coding is great! But we don't need to build anything from scratch.

#vibecoding #skill #claude

Vibe coding with Claude is addictive. You describe what you want, Claude writes it, you iterate. It feels productive. But here's what I learned the hard way: You're often reinventing wheels that have thousands of GitHub stars.

That's why I have build a "Don't Reinvent the Wheel" skill, namely programming-advisor. It triggers whenever I say things like: "I want to build a...", "Help me create...", "Can you code...".

Before Claude writes a single line of code, it searches for existing solutions and show me a comparison table.

For example, when I ask "I want to build a Hacker News CLI to browse top stories from terminal". It will reply by following

  ## 🔍 Existing Solutions Found

  ### NPM Packages
  - hackernews-cli: Browse HN from terminal | 200+ stars
  - haxor-news: Full featured HN CLI in Python | 3.8K stars
  - hn-cli: Minimal HN reader | 150+ stars

  ### Open Source Tools
  - circumflex: Beautiful HN terminal client | 1K+ stars
  - clx: TUI for Hacker News | 400+ stars

  ## 📊 Build vs Buy Comparison

  | Option | Type | Cost | Setup | Maintenance | Est. Tokens |
  |--------|------|------|-------|-------------|-------------|
  | circumflex | CLI tool | Free | 1 min | None | 0 |
  | haxor-news | CLI tool | Free | 2 min | None | 0 |
  | Custom CLI | Build | Free | 2-4 hrs | You own it | ~40-80K |

  ## 💡 Recommendation

  Install circumflex or haxor-news. Both are mature, well-maintained,
  and have features you'll forget to implement:

  - Collapsible comments
  - Vim keybindings
  - Color themes
  - Story filtering
  - Offline caching

I installed circumflex in 10 seconds. It does everything I wanted plus features I didn't know I needed.
Tokens saved: ~50K. Time saved: 3 hours.

Wanna try it?

Install the skill:

# Add the marketplace
/plugin marketplace add gaupoit/programming-advisor

# Install the plugin
/plugin install programming-advisor

Or try the demo project:

git clone https://github.com/gaupoit/dont-reinvent-the-wheel-demo.git
cd dont-reinvent-the-wheel-demo
claude

Happy Coding/Vibing

Top comments (1)

Sloan the DEV Moderator • Jan 9

We loved your post so we shared it on social.

Keep up the great work!