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YES! I have been playing with vibe coding tools since they came out. "Playing" because only on rare occasions have I created something that is good enough to commit/keep/use. I keep playing with them because, well I have a subscription, but also so I don't fall into the fuddy-duddy camp of "all AI is bad" and can legitimately speak on the value, or lack thereof, of these tools.
Claude Code is super cool, no doubt, and with _highly targeted_ and _well planned_ tasks it can produce valuable output. Period. But, every attempt at full-vibe-coding I've done has gotten hung up at some point and I have to step in an manually fix this. My experience is often:
1. First Prompt: Oh wow, this is amazing, this is the future
2. Second Prompt: Ok, let me just add/tweak a few things
10. 10th prompt: Ugh, everytime I fix one thing, something else breaks
I'm not sure at all what I'm doing "wrong". Flogging the agents along doesn't not work well for me or maybe I am just having trouble letting go of the control and I'm not flogging enough?
But the bottom line is I am generally shocked that something like Gas Town was able to be vibe-coded. Maybe it's a case of the LLM overstating what it's accomplished (typical) and if you look under the hood it's doing 1% of what it says it is but I really don't know. Clearly it's doing something, but then I sit over here trying to build a simple agent with some MCPs hooked up to it using a LLM agent framework and it's falling over after a few iterations.
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I’ve definitely hit that same pattern in the early iterations, but for me it hasn’t really been a blocker. I’ve found the iteration loop itself isn’t that bad as long as you treat it like normal software work. I still test, review, and check what it actually did each time, but that’s expected anyway. What’s surprised me is how quickly things can scale once the overall architecture is thought through. I’ve built out working pieces in a couple of weeks using Claude Code, and a lot of that time was just deciding on the architecture up front and then letting it help fill in the details. It’s not hands-off, but used deliberately, it’s been quite effective https://robos.rnsu.net
So I’m probably in a similar spot - I mostly prompt-and-check, unless it’s a throwaway script or something, and even then I give it a quick glance.
One thing that stands out in your steps and that I’ve noticed myself- yeah, by prompt 10, it starts to suck. If it ever hits “compaction” then that’s beyond the point of return.
I still find myself slipping into this trap sometimes because I’m just in the flow of getting good results (until it nosedives), but the better strategy is to do a small unit of work per session. It keeps the context small and that keeps the model smarter.
“Ralph” is one way to do this. (decent intro here: https://www.aihero.dev/getting-started-with-ralph)
Another way is “Write out what we did to PROGRESS.md” - then start new session - then “Read @PROGRESS.md and do X”
Just playing around with ways to split up the work into smaller tasks basically, and crucially, not doing all of those small tasks in one long chat.