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by florianherrengt 337 days ago
I'll accept this criticism. I've only done it for a month or so. That said, I do feel confident that, after reading plenty of online articles, I have learnt 80% of AI coding skills. I configured Playwright and PostgreSQL MCP. Loads of unit and e2e tests for Claude to run after each change. Storybook for my components. I have multiple doc files in each folder. I'm happy to learn though and would welcome any suggestions.What am I missing?

Right now, I have a bug with my message queue. I didn't spend enough time thinking about the proper way to implement and test it. I guess I also didn't pay enough attention to the PR. But then, if I did, is it really vibe coding or classic software engineering while getting Claude to write for me with the added burden of reviewing it thoroughly?

The issue is that if a user sends a message to someone, quickly switches to someone else and sends a message, both messages get sent to the first person.

I'll have to figure out why it happens. My guess is that it's somewhere in the React app. Claude can't figure it out. What can I do to help it?

1 comments

I had to learn the hard way that you need to know at least the structure of what the code should be doing. Vibe coding doesn't work for long if you just YOLO repeatedly, you need breadcrumbs back to sanity. If you get lost in the weeds the LLM can refactor itself back to understandability but it won't get there itself (at least not yet).
I know what the code should be doing. But it's not doing it. Now I have to deep dive into a codebase that's far less familiar to me than if I'd written it. This isn't usually such a frequent issue because systems typically have dedicated owners. We structure it this way precisely because debugging someone else code is just harder.

As for the broader responsibilities. Things like architecting systems, shaping their structure and behavior, planning their evolution and keeping everything clean with regular refactoring. These sound exactly like what I've been doing for the past 15 years. So what's actually different here?