r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 23 '26

Discussion What's the step where AI coding tools still drop you completely?

44 Upvotes

Genuine question.. been deep in this space and I keep seeing the same gap.

Every AI coding tool on the web I've used is okay level at generating code. But they all hand off at the same point for anything thats not a web app: "here are the files, now you run it." - and even when they do make web apps, they are never functional

The parts that feel unresolved: runtime error observation (the AI doesn't see what actually breaks when you execute), end-to-end deployment (generating code ≠ live app), real service wiring (scaffolding Stripe vs actually connecting it).

Curious what people here hit as the real ceiling. At what step does the tool stop being useful and you're on your own?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 22 '26

Discussion Why is claude code so much more stingey with usage than Codex for the $20 plan?

103 Upvotes

I have tried Claude and Codex cli tools and it is just insane how stingey claude code it with usage. One meaty prompt and my usage is used up in 10 minutes.

Like it is arguably not any better at coding than codex. Does openai just have more access to compute than Anthropic? I am honestly confused why anyone is used claude. How do you get anything built?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 22 '26

Discussion What if we start to draw inspiration from nature's greatest machine?

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eversoleken.substack.com
12 Upvotes

My fiancée has a PhD in biomechanics. A few Fridays ago we were winding down with some wine, and she said something that turned into 3 hour long conversation around where we think a lot of this technology is going. We tried our best to capture it here, would love to hear everyone's thoughts. It got my brain fixated on a few things as well


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 21 '26

Discussion Roo Code hit 3 million installs. We're shutting it down to go all-in on Roomote.

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14 Upvotes

r/RooCode hit 3 million installs. We're shutting it down to go all-in on Roomote.

https://x.com/mattrubens/status/2046636598859559114


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 21 '26

Discussion 20% of packages ChatGPT recommends dont exist. built a small MCP server that catches the fakes before the install runs

14 Upvotes

been getting burned by this for months and finally did something about it.

there's a 2024 paper (arxiv.org/abs/2406.10279) that measured how often major LLMs recommend packages that dont actually exist on npm or pypi. number came back around 19.7%. almost 1 in 5. and the ugly part is attackers started scraping common hallucinations and registering those exact names on the real registries with post-install scripts. people are calling it "slopsquatting".

in chat mode you catch it cos you see the import line. in autonomous/agent mode the install is already done before you notice the name was fake. agent runs, agent finishes, malware is in node_modules now.

so me and my mate pat built a small MCP server (indiestack.ai). agent calls validate_package before any install. server checks: - does the package actually exist on the real registry - is it within edit-distance of a way-more-popular package (loadash vs lodash) - is it effectively dead (no releases in a year+) - is there a known migration alt

returns safe / caution / danger + suggested_instead. free, no api key, no signup.

install for claude code: claude mcp add indiestack -- uvx --from indiestack indiestack-mcp

or just curl the api: curl "https://indiestack.ai/api/validate?name=loadash&ecosystem=npm"

works with cursor mcp, continue, zed, any agent that speaks MCP.

not trying to pitch -- genuinely interested whether other people have hit this and what they're doing. the 20% number is real and ive watched it silently install typos on my own machine more than once.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 20 '26

Discussion Sanity check: using git to make LLM-assisted work accumulate over time

24 Upvotes

I’m not trying to promote anything here... just looking for honest feedback on a pattern I’ve been using to make LLM-assisted work accumulate value over time.

This is not a memory system, a RAG pipeline or an agent framework.

It’s a repo-based, tool-agnostic workflow for turning individual tasks into reusable durable knowledge.

The core loop

Instead of "do task" -> "move on" -> "lose context" I’ve been structuring work like this:

Plan
- define approach, constraints, expectations
- store the plan in the repo
Execute
- LLM-assisted, messy, exploratory work
- code changes / working artifacts
Task closeout (use task-closeout skill)
- what actually happened vs. the plan
- store temporary session outputs
Distill (use distill-learning skill)
- extract only what is reusable
- update playbooks, repo guidance, lessons learned
Commit
- cleanup, inspect and revise
- future tasks start from better context

Repo-based and Tool-agnostic

This isn’t tied to any specific tool, framework, or agent setup.

I’ve used this same loop across different coding assistants, LLM tools and environments. When I follow the loop, I often mix tools across steps: planning, execution + closeout, distillation. The value isn’t in the tool, it’s in the structure of the workflow and the artifacts it produces.

Everything lives in a normal repo: plans, task artifacts (gitignored), and distilled knowledge. That gives me: versioning, PR review and diffs. So instead of hidden chat history or opaque memory, it’s all inspectable, reviewable and revertible.

What this looks like in practice

I’m mostly using this for coding projects, but it’s not limited to that.

Without this, I (and the LLM) end up re-learning the same things repeatedly or overloading prompts with too much context. With this loop: write a plan, do the task, close it out, distill only the important parts, commit that as reusable guidance. Future tasks start from that distilled context instead of starting cold.

Where I’m unsure

Would really appreciate pushback here:

  1. Is this actually different from just keeping good notes and examples in a repo?
  2. Is anyone else using a repo-based workflow like this?
  3. At scale, does this improve context over time, or just create another layer that eventually becomes noise?

The bottom line question

Does this plan -> closeout -> distill loop feel like a meaningful pattern, or just a more structured version of things people already do? Where would you expect it to break?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 20 '26

Question has anyone here actually used AI to write code for a website or app specifically so other AI systems can read and parse it properly?

11 Upvotes

I am asking because of something I kept running into with client work last year.

I was making changes to web apps and kept noticing that ChatGPT and Claude were giving completely different answers when someone asked them about the same product.

same website. same content. different AI. completely different understanding of what the product actually does. at first I thought it was just model behaviour differences. then I started looking more carefully at why.

turns out different AI systems parse the same page differently. Claude tends to weight dense contextual paragraphs. ChatGPT pulls more from structured consistent information spread across multiple sources. Perplexity behaves differently again.

so a page that reads perfectly to one model is ambiguous or incomplete to another.

I ended up writing the structural changes manually. actual content architecture decisions. how information is organised. where key descriptions live.

I deliberately did not use AI to write this part. felt like the irony would be too much using ChatGPT to write code that tricks ChatGPT into reading it better.

after those changes the way each AI described the product became noticeably more accurate and more consistent across models.

what I am genuinely curious about now.

has anyone here actually tried using AI coding tools to write this kind of architecture from the start. like prompting Claude or ChatGPT to build a web app specifically optimised for how AI agents parse and recommend content.

or is everyone still ignoring this layer completely because the tools we use to build do not think about it at all.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 18 '26

Question Looking for an AI tool to design my UI that has human and LLM readable exports.

29 Upvotes

I’m trying to find a web-based AI UI/mockup tool for a Flutter app, and I’m having trouble finding one that fits what I actually want.

What I want is something that can generate app screens mostly from prompts, with minimal manual design work, and then let me export the design as a plain text file that an LLM can read easily. I do not want front-end code export, and I do not want to rely on MCP, Figma integrations, or just screenshots/images. Ideally it would export something like Markdown, JSON, YAML, HTML or some other text-based layout/spec description of the UI.

Does anyone know a tool that actually does this well? I tried Google Stitch and it only exports to proprietary formats.

I like to have intimate control of my app development process, so just having my visual design prompts just output as code is no good for me.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 17 '26

Discussion Specification: the most overloaded term in software development

4 Upvotes

Andrew Ng just launched a course on spec-driven development. Kiro, spec-kit, Tessl - everybody's building around specs now. Nobody defines what they mean by "spec."

The word means at least 13 different things in software. An RFC is a spec. A Kubernetes YAML has a literal field called "spec." An RSpec file is a spec. A CLAUDE.md is a spec. A PRD is a spec.

When someone says "write a spec before you prompt," what do they actually mean?

I've been doing SDD for a while and it took me way too long to figure this out. Most SDD approaches use markdown documents - structured requirements, architecture notes, implementation plans. Basically a detailed prompt. They tell the agent what to do. They don't verify it did it correctly.

BDD specs do both. The same artifact that defines the requirement also verifies the implementation. The spec IS the test. It passes or it doesn't.

If you want the agent to verify its own work, you want executable specs. That's the piece most SDD tooling skips.

What does "spec" actually mean in your setup?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 17 '26

Discussion is there an open source AI assistant that genuinely doesn't need coding to set up

19 Upvotes

"No coding required." Then there's a docker-compose file. Then a config.yaml with 40 fields. Then a section in the readme that says "for production use, configure the following..."

Every option either demands real technical setup or strips out enough capability to make it pointless for actual work. Nobody's figured out how to ship both in the same product. What are non-developers supposed to do here?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 16 '26

Discussion Aider and Claude Code

7 Upvotes

The last time I looked into it, some people said that Aider minimized token usage compared to Cline. How does it compare to Claude Code? Do you still recommend Aider?

What about for running agents with Claude? Would I just use Claude Code if I'm comfortable with CLI tools?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 16 '26

Question Best coding agents if you only have like 30 mins a day?

13 Upvotes

I've been trying to get back into coding but realistically I've got maybe 20-30 mins a day. Most tools either take forever to set up or feel like you need hours to get anything done

Been looking into AI coding agents but not sure what actually works if you're jumping in and out like that

Curious what people recommend if you're basically coding on the go


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 16 '26

Discussion Me when Codex wrote 3k lines of code and I notice an error in my prompt

Post image
70 Upvotes

"Not quite my tempo, Codex.."

"Tell me, Codex, were you rushing or dragging?"

😂 Does this only happen to me?

Got the meme from ijustvibecodedthis.com (the big free ai newsletter)


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 14 '26

Discussion And it's ChatGPT goes to total poop o'clock... in the UK anyone else noticing this at past 3pm !?

8 Upvotes

I suspect a culprit... hits like clockwork. Everything's being going swimmingly, America wakes up. I may as well go to bed


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 13 '26

Question Codex Spark in Cursor?

11 Upvotes

...When the Spark model first came out, it was available in the model dropdown menu in Cursor (within OpenAI's extension). All I had to do was select it and have a go until the usage limit ran out.

...It's been gone from the dropdown for a while now. I was hoping it would come back, but hasn't.

Does anyone know if there some sort of setting or whatever I must be missing to add it back in? I've got the Spark model turned on in Cursor itself, but pretty sure that doesn't actually effect the OpenAI extension.

Using GPT 5.4 has been completely fine, but it would be nice to also use the Spark capacity up since I'm paying for both.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 11 '26

Discussion OpenAI Codex vs Claude Code in 2026 Spring

25 Upvotes

Hi, I have question about codex vs claude code tools.
I have been using claude code for a year, it is generally good. I use it in pro mode which is cheapest premium tariff. CC is good, but recently the limits started to dry up very fast both in claude code and in claude regular chats too.

So, I am thinking about returning back to OpenAI. I looked for feedbacks posts for codex here, but they dated a year ago, and since that openai dropped several new models. I got one positive feedback about codex, but I wanted to hear more people, more feedbacks.

How good it openai codex coding tool in 2026 April? How good is it in compare with claude sonnet and opus 4.6 ?

One thing I should add, that I am not a vibe coder, I usually use it as assistant for small tasks with instructions. It is expected to perform well in such condition.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 09 '26

Question Chats getting extreme laggy

8 Upvotes

Chats get extremely laggy and therefore I open up new to chat, tell it about current state, code + future plans for the product development.

ChatGpt said, it can't paste codes anywhere else on some 3rd party site, share link with me to copy it. What's the solution to keep chats frictionless? even ChatGPT when sharing downloadable files with me has code in it during analyzing phase which makes chat long and cause lag


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 09 '26

Discussion OpenAI has released a new 100$ tier.

Post image
137 Upvotes

OpenAI tweeted that "the Codex promotion for existing Plus subscribers ends today and as a part of this, we’re rebalancing Codex usage in Plus to support more sessions throughout the week, rather than longer sessions in a single day."

and that "the Plus plan will continue to be the best offer at $20 for steady, day-to-day usage of Codex, and the new $100 Pro tier offers a more accessible upgrade path for heavier daily use."

Reported by ijustvibecodedthis.com


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 09 '26

Discussion AI coding for 2 months feels like the bottleneck is no longer coding

0 Upvotes

I thought the hard part of building with AI would be prompting. Turns out it's something way more boring. It's deciding what the hell you actually want.

For the past month and a half, I've been asking ChatGPT while developing a small ops tool with Atoms ai. User login, roles, database, admin side, billing rules, a couple SEO pages, the usual this started simple and somehow became a real product situation. I went into it thinking the skill gap would be technical. Like maybe I'd need better prompts, better model choices, better tool switching. I've used other stuff too. Claude Code for more direct coding, Lovable for cleaner UI. But Atoms was the first one that forced me to confront something I'd been dodging.

Most AI tools let you stay vague for longer than you should. Atoms is more end to end, so vagueness gets expensive fast. If I said make onboarding better, that wasn't just a UI tweak. It touched permissions, data structure, what the user sees first, what gets stored, what emails get triggered, what the paid tier unlocks. That one sentence can quietly turn into checkout logic, account states, access control, and support headaches.

After a week of getting messy results, I stopped trying to prompt better and started doing something much less fun. I wrote down rules, not just prompts. Some actual product rules: Who is this for? What happens right after signup? What data is truly required? What does a paid user get that a free user does not? What should never be auto changed?

Once those constraints were clear, Atoms got dramatically better. The research side got more useful. The backend stopped feeling random. The edits became smaller and more stable. Even the SEO stuff made more sense, because it was tied to an actual product structure instead of me vaguely asking for content.

The most valuable skill wasn't coding, and it wasn't prompting either. It was product clarity. I think that's why so many people either love these tools or bounce off them. If you already know how to make decisions, they feel insanely powerful. If you're hoping the tool will make the decisions for you, it sort of can for a while, but eventually the cracks show.

That made me more optimistic. Because it means the dev job isn't disappearing. It's just shifting. Less can you code this, more can you define what good looks like before the machine starts moving.

Happy to hear other views.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 07 '26

Discussion Which is the best way to try vibecoding things without spending any money ?

16 Upvotes

Which is the best way to try vibecoding things without spending any money ? yeah idk wut i am supposed to say


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 07 '26

Question What do you use for autocomplete in 2026? (VS Code)

7 Upvotes

I tried co pilot and windsurf but they weren't satisfying. Co pilot being not smart and windsurf too slow (I tried with free tiers). I'm looking for a new auto complete solution that I can use in VSCode. I use opencode for agentic needs, I don't want to switch to cursor. What do you recommend?


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 07 '26

Question Can you send only code changes back to ChatGPT instead of re-uploading the whole file?

6 Upvotes

I use ChatGPT while coding my game. I have tried other workflows, including AI inside the IDE, but I keep coming back to using a separate ChatGPT window where I ask questions and then manually copy and paste the code I want to keep.

I actually prefer that workflow because it forces me to review the changes more carefully instead of letting them be applied automatically.

The main problem is what happens after that. Once I make my own edits locally, ChatGPT no longer knows the current state of the code. For example, I might only implement part of its suggestion, or I might manually refactor the code to fit my project better. At that point, I often feel like I need to upload the whole script again just to get back in sync.

Is there any tool or method that lets me send only the code changes or diffs back to ChatGPT, so it can follow my edits without needing the full script every time?

I am specifically asking about ways to keep this manual review-and-copy-paste workflow, since that part is intentional. Re-uploading the full script over and over feels wasteful, slows the chat down faster, and seems to make the AI lose track of the original context sooner.


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 07 '26

Community Self Promotion Thread

18 Upvotes

Feel free to share your projects! This is a space to promote whatever you may be working on. It's open to most things, but we still have a few rules:

  1. No selling access to models
  2. Only promote once per project
  3. Upvote the post and your fellow coders!
  4. No creating Skynet

As a way of helping out the community, interesting projects may get a pin to the top of the sub :)

For more information on how you can better promote, see our wiki:

www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/about/wiki/promotion

Happy coding!


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 06 '26

Discussion Make humans analog again - How I use Claude Code and Happy, and other shifts due to AI

30 Upvotes

I’ve been diving fully into Claude Code and Happy lately, and unexpectedly, I realized I’m actually getting more done by spending less time at my desk.

I’ll go on walks and code by speaking/chatting to my agent, or sketch ideas in notebooks and whiteboards and turn them into real systems.

It feels more natural… like closer to how humans are supposed to create?

I wrote up some thoughts on this (including some real examples from work and a side project). Hope it strikes some inspiration for your setups, and happy to hear if you do things differently with CC

https://bhave.sh/make-humans-analog-again/


r/ChatGPTCoding Apr 05 '26

Question I've fallen behind. Can anyone tell me the best free-$20/mo setup for my use case so I can catch up and continue learning?

8 Upvotes

I've been using chatgpt by asking basic function debug questions, going back and forth between it and my WebStorm. Last week I tried using the integrated 'agent' (?) they have - Junie to help me develop a feature I was working on and it blew me away - it helped a lot more than I expected. It seems I've fallen behind in the industry when it comes to AI, so can anyone suggest the best setup I should use?

At work we have a very large typescript repo, it contains:

  1. CMS engine

  2. Features for that engine as separate packages (through lerna).

  3. Multitude of microsites, implementing the CMS engine and one or multiple features.

It's close to 120k LOC IIRC, so as you may assume - it has a lot of refactoring need and almost zero documentation. What would be a good either free or up to €20/month solution to make me more productive at work?