Vibe coding promised speed - why do I feel like I'm babysitting
I'm not new to programming - nearly a decade in FSSD and IS - but I am new to vibe coding. My first projects were built at the speed of sound and were objectively terrible, so I started running my vibe coding sessions like an IT PM runs scrum (instead of like a bridezilla who wants to design her own wedding dress - big ideas, bigger attitude, zero legitimate planning, just a budget and a dream).
I invested the time to decide the major details in advance -- infrastructure, routes, integration endpoints, schema, wireframing, blah blah etc etc -- I even baked in QA and security validation. My first successful project using this strategy was a website and it's perfect. Barely any tweaking needed, still took some time designing the implementation, but I finished in an evening.
But now my average feature implementation takes like 20 minutes - 1 hour. I read that people ship full SaaS apps in a weekend, but I'm on day two of babysitting this build and I'm not even halfway there.
- Are my projects overly ambitious?
- Am I overloading the LLM with the requirements?
- Am I using the wrong model versions for the different tasks?
- Am I overthinking it and expecting the AI to "under"think it?
Context: I've been using Opus 4.7 to build a local-first security scanner for mac/linux and windows binaries. 32 contracts with 3 reference/context docs. Running each feature in a new session and pushing PRs to feature branches for review before merge. It seems like everything is completing as expected. It's just taking eleventeen trillion years.
Advice?