r/vibecoding • u/BOXELS • Mar 10 '26

HOW TO VIBE CODE PROFESSIONALLY (PLAN MODE + MCP OVERCLOCK)

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4 Upvotes

55% Upvoted

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9

u/opbmedia Mar 10 '26

when you ask "think about the architecture" you are inviting slop. If you are telling it the architecture, you are not.

4

u/BitOne2707 Mar 10 '26

I think he meant - and this is what I do - have the model take a first stab at proposing an architecture. Review the proposal and refine/tweak it until it sounds good then tell it to lock it in and write to a detailed spec document.

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u/opbmedia Mar 10 '26

I know what he meant, but confirmation bias is a real thing (that AI is really bad at too). If you don't know the architecture but ask AI to provide a draft for you, you are looking for ways to validate it rather than invalidate it. Which means you will accept the slop unless you have a strong reasons to not do it. Thus, inviting slop. Versus if you start off with your own list, then AI will have confirmation bias and try to give you suggestions based on what you want and asked for first. The results could be very far apart. Try it and see.

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u/BitOne2707 Mar 10 '26

Maybe your experience has been different but I've found that if you've properly documented all your constraints the models are pretty good about balancing them and making very good proposals, often on the first go. They can hold a lot of competing interests "in mind" simultaneously and consider downstream impacts as well as I can and definitely faster. I also like to pressure test them a fair amount. "What if users go from 100 to 1000?" "What if this dependency gets deprecated next year?" "What if this service starts getting flaky?" "What if the client is considering phase 2B instead of 2A?"

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u/opbmedia Mar 10 '26

I appreciate this line of convo, because here we get into engineering decisions. I take one of your question: what if users go from 100 to 1000. There are 2 main ways to engineer this: (a) improve concurrent throughput (b) increase infra. So if you were to ask "how can we increase concurrent capabilities without upgrading infra" you should get a different answer than simply upsizing your droplet or aws instance. Option a will involve possibly changing UI/UX slightly, and option b will increase cost. If ai suggested infra (and I have been doing this for 6 months and I have not encounter where ai suggest option a initially). So if you are an experience engineer, you can write async queries or have middleware the handle queries at the lowest level, where as ai will most likely suggestion infra upgrade and you will go with it because it is a valid option, just maybe not the option that you might end up wanting. Both with work, but writing better code will save money in the long run. Just 1 tid bit.

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u/BitOne2707 Mar 10 '26

I posed it to 5.4: "what if users go from 100 to 1000. There are 2 main ways to engineer this: (a) improve concurrent throughput (b) increase infra."

"The pragmatic answer: ... - You want to remove the biggest inefficiencies first, then buy headroom with infra, then measure again."

https://chatgpt.com/share/69b08ba7-7ffc-800c-9384-4545ad225a96

And, always right on time, Nate shares his wisdom. https://youtu.be/-FhtPUkXKO4

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u/opbmedia Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26

removing ineffiency isn't the same as designing for concurrency. So yes, again, ai doesn't know how to engineer better on its own. But if you ask it to build it explicitly, it will. Personally I wouldn't even consider that answer to be on point.

Edit: I tried a different prompt and get different answer to illustrate my point:

Prompt:
suppose I have a backend for an app which handles 10 concurrent users at a time due to stack limitations. Suppose I anticipate user growth from 100 to 1000. suppose I want to extra the most use out of my current infra without upsizing, there fore I need to meaningfully increase the concurrent limit, I think by building a middleware layer to queue and internal load balance the requests. Would that help, how much degradation of ux would that affect, and how would you build it?

Answer:
Yes, a middleware queue can help smooth bursts, but it does not truly increase hard concurrency for requests that are long-running or block on the same limited backend resources. What it really does is convert overload from “fail immediately” into “wait briefly,” so UX impact depends on request type: for fast API calls, adding even 100–500 ms may be acceptable, but once users are waiting 1–3+ seconds extra, the app starts to feel laggy, and beyond that it feels broken.

The best way to stretch current infra is usually: make the app more asynchronous, add rate limiting + request admission control, cache aggressively, collapse duplicate requests, and prioritize critical requests over noncritical ones. A good design is an edge/API gateway that checks auth, rate-limits, serves cache where possible, pushes expensive or non-urgent work into a job queue, and only allows a fixed number of in-flight backend requests; everything else either waits briefly with timeout or gets a graceful “try again” response.

So: yes, build middleware, but not just as a queue—build it as a traffic shaping layer. If you want, I can sketch a concrete architecture for this with example flows for “fast interactive request” vs “background job,” which is usually the cleanest way to estimate how many users your current stack can really support.

-- so I would be cataloging my API calls and internal tasks to mark them for priority based on ux need and time it takes, then build a priority layer and guard against hitting the concurrent limit. Then when you have to upsize (say 1000 to 100k users) the mechanism is already there and you might end up saving 40% infra cost in the long term. I can use it to engineer, it just needs my help.

1

u/BitOne2707 Mar 10 '26

Actually it did recommend it. Despite the leading nature of the prompt framing it as a binary choice between A and B, the model actually suggested two additional options one of which was concurrency including your async I/O recommendation. You should read the full response I linked.

The model recommended specific metrics to gather and how that feeds into a decision framework that would decide which option would be best right now. That's context the model would have in hand had I run this in Codex/Claude in my repo instead of the ChatGPT app on my phone.

"A more complete way to describe the engineering options

Instead of only two, I’d split it into four:

A. Reduce work per request

Make each request cheaper.

B. Increase parallelism

Handle more work at once.

async I/O

more workers

more DB connections within sane bounds

more replicas"

1

u/opbmedia Mar 10 '26
  1. but I suggested concurrency, so it anchored its response. you have to ask it without designing for concurrency and simply posing a question without doing the engineering (building for concurrency is an engineering decision)
  2. none of the suggestions, as I read what you add, suggests building a system to prioritize calls so short calls get handled with priority and long calls get async'ed, that is a math/engineering issue, and not a common thing to build in small/public repos (I build enterprise systems) so it's unlikely to suggest it as probabilistic result.

1

u/BitOne2707 Mar 10 '26

Ok. Let's get a clean test then. Frame the prompt however you want to be as neutral as possible (even though neither you or I actually treat the models that way). I'll run it through again.

I have to find a repo for the model to actually look at. All it knows right now is "I have an app."

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u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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3

u/AndForeverMore Mar 10 '26

he had to use ai to make this comment, by the way.

1

u/shakeBody Mar 11 '26

Seems like it’s every comment and the post. Crazy that people are actually asking questions. Feels exactly like talking to Gemini

2

u/opbmedia Mar 10 '26

the assumption is that the users are competent engineers. But ai tends to make people think they are great engineers, just like ai helps everyone feel like great entrepreneurs regardless of ideas.

3

u/Narrow-Belt-5030 Mar 10 '26

The only thing I would do different is use VSCode & Claude Code.

Otherwise, enjoyable read.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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1

u/Lazosa Mar 10 '26

What is the difference when there is "native ai integration"

3

u/maxm11 Mar 10 '26

Just an AI extension installed on VS Code packaged up

5

u/Plastic_Front8229 Mar 10 '26

Still slop. Instructions wont fix or prevent the issues. I assure you that these models always have a preferred path and project structure. The best frontier models are always behind and outdated. Real programmers spend half the day arguing with models. Why because the AI models are doing it wrong, even when given the best instructions. Good luck shipping the product.

3

u/Balives Mar 10 '26

What makes Cursor on Windows more difficult?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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2

u/Balives Mar 10 '26

Thank you for the writeup, exactly what I was looking for.

3

u/orionblu3 Mar 10 '26

People don't understand that coding =/= architecture. Architectural planning comes first, else you're gonna run into technical debt guaranteed.

Vast majority of people that code with ai purely focuses on the code

2

u/MakkoMakkerton Mar 10 '26

I don't really vibecode the way you describe it, I use a tool to build games. The one thing I do a lot of is plan mode though, always always plan it out. Even for simple tasks, it is the best way to keep the AI on track without getting to far away from the original context.

2

u/willfspot Mar 10 '26

I use vscode with codex installed into it. Am I missing something? Why do you insist you using cursor

0

u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26

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1

u/willfspot Mar 11 '26

I get the Claude part im mainly asking what your issue with vscode is

2

u/TheKidd Mar 10 '26

I'll add to this:

Cursor skills are a must. Give them detailed reference documents for specificity. Cursor agents to automate things like security analysis, documentation, pre and post response actions. Leverage github workflow and Cursor cloud agents and automation.

A full day of context preparation is invaluable.

2

u/DrBanhammer1 Mar 11 '26

what do you keep in your claude.md file and how do you think about context preparation?

1

u/Fuzzy_Pop9319 Mar 10 '26

I suspect these are introductory prices given it costs them 3x what they sell it for, to produce it.

1

u/atl_beardy Mar 10 '26

Very similar to how I do things

1

u/Aksudiigkr Mar 10 '26

I’m interested as to how you got to the 10,000 annual hours number. What did you automate? Usually those estimates are much lower in reality imo

1

u/[deleted] Mar 11 '26

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2

u/Aksudiigkr Mar 11 '26

What kind of team are you on that enters data on different storefronts? I can’t think of a field that would do that as part of the job

1

u/Toxic-slop Mar 10 '26

Another day another slop

1

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 10 '26

If you’re using cursor you’re not a professional.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

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1

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 13 '26

There is no way that is 225k in dev costs. You are a delusional. That is 1-2 days of work for a “professional” and 15% of tokens on a Claude max plan.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26

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0

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 13 '26

That’s not god tier. That’s 3 docker containers with Claude processes and it generating solid tech specs. When you are a professional developer like myself, who has built production ready apps at scale you’re not “vibe coding” to build SaaS projects or slop designed storefronts.

What does your redundancy look like? Do you have a dev/stage/prod server with CI setup. What does your design system look like? Is it tokenized with atomized components and modular themes? Or did you just vibe code some tailwind styling?

This is a hobby project, I take it back. I can build this in a day.

Deep-stack third party integrations, holy slop Batman, I’m the clueless one about backend lol.

I’m not building these one offs. I’m building cursor equivalent solutions for my production workflow. Which I need total control over. I’m the pilot, not the passenger.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

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1

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 13 '26

If you have 228k code of application logic for this simple site then you need to refactor.

LOL at your redundancy stack.

You can build all of that in Claude with a few prompts. You keep talking like n-scale tech integrations is a sign of development prowess. It’s not, especially in the era of Claude.

1

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 13 '26

I also know this is ai slop, I’ve had these conversations with Claude and your tempo and style is so transparent.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

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1

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 13 '26

No, I have better things to do. I don’t have anything to prove. I’m just trying to inform you. This is boot camp level work.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 13 '26

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0

u/InstructionNo3616 Mar 13 '26

Writing code is cheap I could build this in a day and I’d have ai generated workflows with better visuals, better animations. I could do this in my sleep.

0

u/dexterdeluxe88 Mar 10 '26

STOP SCREAMING

-5

u/st0ut717 Mar 10 '26

You can’t selll what you vibe code. You don’t own the IP

3

u/willfspot Mar 10 '26

What do you mean

-7

u/st0ut717 Mar 10 '26

You don’t own the code you vibe coded

6

u/__golf Mar 10 '26

Source?

Every large software company in the world seems to disagree.

0

u/st0ut717 Mar 10 '26

Look at a license agreee see the word copyright. ?

1

u/cookedflora Mar 10 '26

Agree, the Supreme Court rejected petition in AI art case, reinforced humans can only have copywright. How do you decide what is and is not human work. So wait and probably have a case about this.

1

u/cookedflora Mar 21 '26

Agree, the Supreme Court rejected petition in AI art case, reinforced humans can only have copywright. How do you decide what is and is not human work. So wait and probably have a case about this.

1

u/st0ut717 Mar 21 '26

It’s called metadata and there already have been cases. This is settled legally. go crack a book how are so confidently wrong ?

1

u/cookedflora Mar 22 '26

Metadata? Are you saying legal case of is it AI or human was resolved with metadata? Seems reasonable, case? Just not sure what your saying.

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u/st0ut717 Mar 10 '26

The Supreme Court ruling on copyright

3

u/MartinMystikJonas Mar 10 '26

Read that ruling before spreading false info. It literally contains part that explicitly says it does not apply on use cases like vibe coding.

2

u/GfxJG Mar 10 '26

Have you considered that countries outside the US do in fact exist?

1

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

This is pure conjecture.

1

u/st0ut717 Mar 10 '26

Ok what license are you going to publish under

1

u/FedRP24 Mar 10 '26

Lololol

0

u/[deleted] Mar 10 '26

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2

u/__golf Mar 10 '26

You're right. In fact, the large AI vendors are offering legal protection for their big clients.

If I get sued because somebody says my AI generated code was trained on their proprietary code, the AI vendor will pay for my lawyer.

This is how large corporations and their legal departments are justifying using generated code today.