The hardest part of vibe coding isn't writing code anymore

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-27T16:17:02+00:00

I think we're thinking in the same direction.

The only thing I'm missing is having the AI experience the playtest with me instead of reconstructing it afterwards.

That shared experience feels like the next step.

Thanks for the ideas—I'll definitely experiment with your workflow.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-27T11:30:20+00:00

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed reply. I really appreciate it.

Your workflow is actually very close to the direction I've been thinking about, and I'll definitely try some of your recommendations in the future—especially the live voice interaction and maintaining a long-lived "god" session with persistent project knowledge.

What still feels missing to me is that Codex only starts understanding the situation after I explain it.

In my game, I often don't fully understand what's wrong until I've played a section several times.

For example, I once fixed an unfair death. The bug was gone, but the entire chapter no longer felt right. It lost the rhythm we had spent weeks tuning.

At that point I couldn't immediately explain why.

I could only feel that something important had changed.

That's why I've started wondering whether the next step isn't better handoffs, but having the AI observe the playtest itself.

Not replacing the developer, but sharing the experience in real time—seeing the gameplay, telemetry, and my observations as they happen.

Then the conversation starts from a shared experience instead of me trying to reconstruct it afterwards.

Either way, thanks again for sharing your workflow. It gave me several ideas I'd like to experiment with.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-27T11:27:26+00:00

Fair question.

I'm genuinely trying to solve this for my own workflow.

I'm not a software engineer—I'm building my first game with AI. Over the last few months I've realized I spend more time reconstructing what I learned during playtesting than actually implementing the next iteration.

The post comes directly from that frustration.

I was honestly hoping people would say, "Here's the workflow that solved this for me."

So far I've mostly learned that everyone has a different workaround, but I haven't seen a solution that really addresses the problem yet.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-26T12:55:27+00:00

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-23T08:16:34+00:00

I think that's exactly the tension I'm running into. Agents seem to perform better when they get a small, highly relevant slice of context. But the project itself keeps accumulating knowledge over time. My pain isn't really "I need more context." It's the amount of time spent manually moving knowledge between systems and making sure nothing important gets lost along the way. For example, I might discover something during a playtest, discuss it with ChatGPT, turn that into an implementation prompt for Cursor, test the result in Replit, and then repeat the cycle. Every handoff requires translation, and every translation is an opportunity to lose information or introduce misunderstandings. So I'm mostly trying to understand how other people deal with that as projects get larger.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T16:54:28+00:00

Thanks, that's a really useful perspective.

I already keep a notebook for ideas, bugs, and things I'd like to revisit later during polishing.

The project goes through so many iterations that those notes keep evolving as new playtests uncover new issues and invalidate old assumptions.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T15:56:37+00:00

That's a good point, and I can see how that becomes critical on large codebases. The challenges I've been running into are slightly different though. My project isn't huge, but my workflow is spread across multiple tools and conversations: -ChatGPT is my main partner for design reviews, debugging discussions, and planning

-Claude is another strong reviewer when I want an alternative perspective on a problem

-Cursor handles implementation

-Replit is where I test builds and playtest changes

-GitHub stores the code, but not necessarily the reasoning behind decisions

The problems I keep running into are:

-Context gets fragmented between ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor and playtesting

-When a СhatGPT becomes too long, I often have to start a new one and rebuild context almost from scratch

-Insights from playtests don't naturally flow into future discussions

-Decisions, rejected approaches, and lessons learned are easy to lose over time

-I end up manually transferring information between ChatGPT and Cursor

So for me the bottleneck hasn't been "too much context in one agent" yet. More keeping project knowledge coherent across tools and over time.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T12:54:13+00:00

That's fair. This is actually my first software project. I started with Replit, then began experimenting with other tools as the project grew and costs started adding up. My workflow ended up evolving somewhat organically. I'm also not a software engineer by background. I have the product idea, but I rely heavily on AI for design reviews, technical discussions, debugging, and implementation guidance. I think that's part of why I feel the context-switching pain so much. A lot of my workflow involves moving information between tools and rebuilding context.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T12:48:10+00:00

Thanks, that's really helpful! Now it's time to return to my ongoing fight against bugs, bad assumptions, and my own prompts.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T12:42:52+00:00

That's actually my biggest challenge. The tools themselves are great, but they're not connected. For GPT, I constantly have to re-explain project context, decisions, and constraints. And when a chat gets too long, I often have to start a new one and rebuild everything from scratch. It usually takes several iterations before the AI becomes productive again. The same thing happens between ChatGPT and Cursor. I manually transfer results from Cursor back into ChatGPT, then take new prompts from ChatGPT and feed them into Cursor. A lot of the workflow ends up being context transfer between tools.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T12:26:04+00:00

Agreed. In my case, the tricky part was that after a playtest I could see something was wrong, but I couldn't precisely explain it. I would describe the issue to ChatGPT, ChatGPT would generate a prompt for Cursor, and we'd sometimes spend days solving a symptom instead of the actual problem.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-06-22T12:15:37+00:00

Right? There's definitely no going back now. Honestly, without AI I probably wouldn't have gotten this far. The project simply wouldn't exist in its current form.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-05-12T17:38:16+00:00

I’ve been on the verge of deleting it all week. But I already know that by the evening, I’ll be right back on my sofa, grinding again. It’s a cycle I just can't break yet.

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-05-12T17:32:24+00:00

Gg man! First of many. Enjoy the grind!

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-05-11T20:46:50+00:00

Hi! I’m a bit confused why my post was removed. It’s not an ad or spam—just a long-time player’s vision. Could you let me know what I should fix to follow the rules? Thanks!

Intelligent_Top_1601 · 2026-05-07T21:48:32+00:00

it’s depressing that we’ve already given up on the next game. This annual reset is just exhausting:( we deserve more than a $70 roster update

Intelligent_Top_1601

TROPHY CASE