[jwpapi]

I’ve written a full stack monorepo with over 1,000 files alone now. I’ve started with AI doing a lot of the work, but the percentage goes down and down. For me a good codebase is not about how much you’ve written, but about how it’s architectured. I want to have an app that has the best possible user and dev experience meaning its easy to maintain and easy to extend. This is achieved by making code easy to understand, for yourself, for others.

In my case it’s more like developing a mindset building a framework than to push feature after feature. I would think it’s like that for most companies. You can get an unpolished version of most apps easily, but polishing takes 3-5x the time.

Lets not talk about development robustness, backend security etc etc. Like AI has just way too many slippages for me in these cases.

However I would still consider myself a heavy AI user, but I mainly use it to discuss plans,(what google used to be) or to check it if I’ve forgotten anything.

For most features in my app I’m faster typing it out exactly the way I want it. (with a bit of auto-complete) The whole brain-coordination works better.

I guess long talk, but you’re not alone trust your instinct. You don’t seem narrow minded.

[ozten]

What does the full stack monorepo do?

[jwpapi]

It’s nothing special. Not in the realm of anything technical outstanding. I just stated that to emphasize that it’s a slightly bigger project than default single-dev coded SAAS projects which are just a single wrapper. We have workers, multiple white-labeled applications sharing a common infrastructure, data scraping modules, AI-powered services, and email processing pipelines.

I’ve had an impossible learning curve the last year, but as I should rather be vibe-coded biased I still use less AI now to make sure it’s more consistent.

I think the two camps are different in terms of skill honestly, but also in terms of needs. Like of course you are faster vibe-coding a front-end then to write the code manually, but build a robust backend/processing system its a different kind of tier.

So instead of picking a side it’s usually best to stay as unbiased as possible and choose the right tool for the task