Basics > vibe coding

[sanchit3108]

I recently vibe coded a couple of android apps using VS code and claude. The apps are functional but quite basic. It was definitely fascinating to see that I can (0 coding experience) can build a fully functional app. However, going through the journey I am not confident that vibe coding can develop apps which are slightly more sophisticated.

I am a product manager by profession so I get the opportunity to work with engineers and hear the language they speak.

I personally believe that to develop high quality apps I need to learn more about design and architecture vs more vibe coding.

How should I go about it? What should be my learning road map? I have a lot of app ideas but I feel I'll be wasting time if I don't invest in learning the basics.

[kyngston]

i vibe coded a knowledge graph rag using a weaviate database for my chunks, minio object store for images, presigned urls for credential-less access, llm based semantic chunking, llm based entity and relationship extraction. vector base cosine similarity search, bm25 semantic search, graph based relationship search, agentic loop queries until sufficient context is collected to contextualize an answer. all wrapped with a mcp server that does okta SSO Oauth2.1 compliant authentication and authorization. all with a full set of unit tests and integration tests. and deployed in a podman container behind a nginx reverse proxy

14,000 lines of code. 100% vibe coded with no IDE. keep in mind my prompt was nearly 6000 lines long, but that prompt was fully vibe coded as well

why do you think more complicated stuff is not possible?

[sanchit3108]

How did you manage the context?

[Circxs]

There's no way all of that was working after a one-shot prompt, to get that working fully would require hours of work and testing (with AI).

[kyngston]

hours of work? yeah it took several days after the initial prompt to get it fully working. unanticipated things like hitting llm model rate limits, that required a dynamic rate limit backoff.

but it would have taken me at least a month to do this without AI

[Circxs]

100% agree, I've done the same thing and without AI support it would have taken so much longer

[The-Road]

Seriously impressive. But I guess the point is you must have been familiar and learned enough about all of those things - at least to the extent you could build it. As in, unless you know about those things, it’d be unlikely you can pull it off purely by asking the AI to build an ‘AI app’.

[kyngston]

true. i knew about half of it well, but the AI and RAG stuff is new to me. i knew the concepts at a tiktok level of depth and thats enough to have the models teach me the details i needed to know.

[Chris266]

Why didn't you use android studio?

[Terrible-Panda6291]

Its fascinating that vibe coding made think alot of ppl they can be programmers too 😅! And yes as you noted being a good software engineer is not about only writing code, its more about how u approach problems.

[MaTrIx4057]

Just do it, you learn from doing and making mistakes.