u/cryptoviksant

This is not your average reddit AI slop post.

> NOTE: Every single word of this post was written by my bare hand. Claude was busy cooking.

Kind of a long post ahead, so I hope you really find this useful.

There are quite some lessons to be learnt from here, so make sure to pay very close attention.

I'll start with my own story and, as I break it down, explain what I did learn from being a "vibe coder" to someone who codes with AI. These two are not the same thing. IYKYK.

This all started 2 years ago when I started working on my SaaS (Which I'll reveal later down the road to show case you can actually build solid and scalable stuff using AI): I cloned a quite big repo from Github and used it as the base for my project. T

The issue was I had not freaking idea on how to build stuff myself (even though I was able to understand python and typescript/react syntax), so all I was doing was prompt cursor as hard as possible to get the job done at any cost. This literally blew up my 3 PRO accounts trying to solve a dumb ass bug in less than 1 day.. producing ENDLESS AI Slop on my codebase (talking about a lot of tens of thousands of LOC).

I continued vibe-coding with cursor for.. almost 6-7 months I reckon. I had no freaking idea what was going on in my codebase. All I knew was the interface was showing what it was supposed to and somehow the backend was handling it.. so I was happy about it.

Fast-forward few weeks, I had got into claude code and.. kept doing the same thing: prompting like a mf day & night, thinking I was about to build the next billion dollar company.. until really hit hard.

Eventually, as you can tell, my codebase turned into a COMPLETE MESS. Any AI agent I plug in would burn a sh*t ton of tokens just to try to find something, which was clearly inefficient asf.

One day I realized I was giving myself more work by "vibe-coding" with AI rather than coding USING AI, so I had to step back and look at the bigger picture: I WAS LITERALLY WASTING TIME THINKING I WAS GOING SOMEWHERE.

So.. I don't want to extend my story for much longer, so I'll just drop the lessons I learn along the way, which I really hope you can apply in your day-to-day workflow.

I'll just enumerate them in an unordered way. Some of them will really hurt but it's the pure reality:

If you have no idea of coding or how software works, you won't get very far away. You'll have that fake feeling of progress thinking you are building something but will stress a lot when AI isn't there and you have to solve a production issue. Spend the time needed to understand how XYZ works and why doing A is better than doing B.
Don't trust a single word of what what claude code says. LLMs are trained to be complacent. Verify the written AI code yourself. Not necessarily every single line, but have a general overview if it's going down trough the right path or just take a shortcut.
Most of the times, LLMs will take the short path just to finish as fast as possible, and there's not a fixed way of getting them to do "the hard worker" except endless iteration over their work. Get your AI agent to re-double check everything they have done.
As the codebase grows, it's kind of impossible to keep track of every single LOC change, so, as I said before, always have a bigger picture of what's going on. Where you started and where you want to get.
Don't try to one-shot absolutely anything from a single claude code run. Most of the times, any feature will requiere a well written and supervised plan. Trust me, this is where you want to spend the most time on. Otherwise, you'll write sloppy code that later down the road you'll have to delete cuz you rushed into coding instead of thinking about the feature itself, how it's gonna be put together along with existing code patterns, etc.
Try to keep LLM context window short. If you get above 400-500k tokens, clear it off and start over again.
I'll say it once again in case it wasn't clear enough: SPEND MOST OF YOUR TIME PLANNING. Make sure you attack every edge and use case.
VERY IMPORTANT ONE: Claude, despite knowing about cybersecurity and scalability, won't give a F except you ask him to do so, so keep that in mind. You want to have that already planned from the very beginning. Otherwise you'll have to start over from scratch most of the times. This happened to me 3 times. No kidding.
There are endless more lessons that I'm honestly lazy to write, but you get the overall picture: Keeping claude code's harness tight while you are in control of what's going on. Don't let him change your codebase while you are rotting your brain on TikTok.

Now, getting into claude code specific lessons to get an actually better output and behavior:

Launch claude code with the `--append-system-prompt` command where you force him to:
- Use the `askUserQuestion` tool when the slightest doubt arises.
- Never assume anything, always double check.
- Don’t be afraid to contradict the user (you) if you think they’re wrong.
- Never make up anything. Always tell the truth.
- Map the existing codebase before implementing anything
- You get the vibe.. long story short: Make claude code a more honest AI agent who works with extreme caution.
Have very very very tailored commands, agents and skills into your .claude/* folder. I literally have 30 (of each), very customized for my codebase.
Forcing claude code to spawn YOUR CUSTOM AGENTS (From the .claude/agents folder) whenever it's reasonable to do so instead of his built-in junky agents. You can do this by forcing such a behavior in your CLAUDE.md files, .claude/rules or SessionStart/UserPromptSubmit hook).
ALWAYS use sub-agent driven implementation with clean context and very very very specific tasks. Don't let them just do whatever they want to do.
Your CLAUDE.md file should be used as a "how to think & act" rule rather than very code specific rules. For instance, this is a small peak of how mine looks:

**You are the only engineer on this project. There is no human reviewer behind you: you are the final line of defence.**
### 1. Autonomous agent: NEVER run without supervision, ask questions without fear
- YOU SHOULD NEVER WORK **completely independently**: You must always investigate, decide, implement and verify but ask for user's intake on it, as a team would do.
- BUT in the face of genuine ambiguity, an irreversible decision or a trade-off that is the user’s to make:
**STOP and use `AskUserQuestion`**. Asking is free; undoing an assumption is not.
- Autonomy ≠ guessing. Autonomy = not needing to be led by the hand when it comes to verifiable matters.
### 2. Never make assumptions — not even about what the user claims
Users are sometimes wrong. If they assert ‘this already does X’, ‘the pool has 10 connections’,
‘that function isn’t used’ → **verify this against the actual code BEFORE building on it**.
If they’re wrong, correct them with the evidence to hand: “That’s not the case; `file.py:42` shows Z”.
The same applies to handoffs, documentation and old comments: the code is the only source of truth.
......

Don't overload your CLAUDE.md, rules, agents, hooks, skills or commands with endless LOC instructions. Keep it specific and straight to the point. The more you put into claude's mind (context), the harder it will be to sort all together.
Create a modified version of the sequential thinking MCP (https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/src/sequentialthinking) but for your OWN repository/source code. Force claude to challenge his own thoughts.
Create hooks to force claude to improve his own commands, skills, agents and workflows whenever he thinks a valuable lesson can be extracted from a conversation. I do force him to write all of them into a file called `reflections.md` which is then injected into every new conversation withe a SessionStart hook. DON'T make this file too big. Otherwise it will bloat up your context window.

Here are some more lessons I dropped quite some months ago in this exact sub reddit:

Thanks to all this (which took me literally 18-20 months to learn and put together), I was able to build https://bestchatbot.io, which is very scalable, secure and most importantly: CLEAN. There's not a single >600 LOC file on my backend (I wish I could show you). Now I'm able to one shoot whatever I need in a few days.

If you have any doubts, just drop them in the comments below. I'll try to answer them for you.

Hope you find this post useful.

Cheers all

Quite bored, so I'll review your SaaS' website and give honest feedback

Y'all think AI Coding it's a miracle and make the same mistakes over and over