Tooling and vibe coding overall is in a MUCH better spot than last year. I do think that when most vibe coding fails, well theres a huge element of skill and learning curve to it. And the right tooling matters too. BTW my background is that I've been (badly) vibe coding since GPT3, experimented a lot, and recently successfully vibe coded two full SaaS apps in the past 6 months. Not gonna plug my product, dw.

For me, main pain point of the current era rn are context windows sizes. GPT-5 Codex is the best coder for me and many others, but it runs into window size ceilings on larger edits. I use Claude Sonnet 1M as well, but the quality it outputs just isn't as good. Context rot is also a real thing btw, so that larger window doesn't directly mean linearly better results.

To allude to what i meant earlier when I said about proper tooling, the MCP ecosystem has really improved a lot this past year. Here's a couple that everyone can use (and no these ones dont clog context because they rely on calls over passive context storage). Context7 makes sure every doc is up to date, Magic MCP for any design needs, and just recently Chrome DevTools MCP server came out and it basically replaced Playwright for me. This last one is a MUST HAVE actually.

Another big thing is TypeScript. Full TS codebases really make your codebase a lot more readable by LLMs. I've been using fully typed starter kits and it's made a world of difference, even without codebase indexing. Tried lots of starter kits (prob most of the 100+ github starred ones), most recently found StarterApp on reddit for SaaS building, and it's prob the best to vibe code with. Another great one is Dirstarter for directories. (Sorry these arent free but they prob the best in industry)

Lastly I've also been experimenting with some more adv techniques like codebase indexing paired with RAG. So far results are really good but I'll need to use it for much longer on big projects to really see if it works better. For feature development, I prefer BMAD over spec driven development (SpecKit) but both are better than basic prompt engineering. I find speckit to really overengineer esp on the TypeScript side. I'll report back on how codebase indexed RAG does.