“Vibe Coding” Like A Professional

“Vibe coding” is the new high. The dopamine rush of brainstorming with a Large Language Model (LLM), copy-pasting a near-perfect snippet, and watching a feature spring to life in minutes is intoxicating. I’ve shipped products this way. I get the thrill.

But I’ve also seen the hangover. Vibe coding, when done without discipline, is the fastest way to accumulate massive technical debt. You’re not building a system; you’re creating elegant-looking spaghetti code at warp speed. The application grows in whatever direction the AI’s probabilistic winds are blowing, while your own architectural understanding remains shallow.

The challenge of our era is not how to use AI to code faster, but how to use it to build better. This requires moving from a “vibe” to a professional loop—a system that harnesses the AI’s power without surrendering to its chaos.

The Evolution of the Beast: A Brief History of My AI Pair Programmers

The effectiveness of any AI-assisted workflow depends heavily on the model you’re working with. My own journey mirrors the evolution of the technology:

• The Early Days (GPT-3.5 and then working with GPT-4): In the early days, it was quite painful to work with GPT-3.5. But when GPT-4 came along it became genuinely useful. It had actionable advice. It was explaining what’s under the hood correctly. I was able to write 2 iOS apps in Swift with it helping along the way.
• The Golden Age (ChatGPT with their o1, o3 and even o4-mini models): When they launched o1 and o3 that’s when I thought these might one day replace some devs for real. They were excellent at following instructions, maintaining context within a session, and generating robust code based on a clear architectural plan. Sometimes I was refactoring an entire module in one shot. I was amazed.
• The “Amnesia” Era (The Switch to GPT-5): Then, the landscape shifted. With the rollout of GPT-5, they turned off the great models and the experience became painful. GPT-5 is amazing for OpenAI because it’s cheaper and it does some party tricks well. The AI became a brilliant but frustratingly forgetful partner. For me it was a step back. I was back to reminding the AI of the architectural principles we had just discussed, and correcting its lazy deviations from the plan. The “vibe” was gone; it was replaced by a constant, tedious battle to keep the AI on track.
• The Architect’s Ally (Anthropic’s Claude): In search of a more disciplined partner, I turned to models like Claude. Its strength lies in its large context window and its remarkable ability to adhere to a complex set of initial instructions. It excels at ground-up scaffolding. You can provide it with your entire Clean Architecture philosophy and a detailed project spec, and it will generate the initial modules with impressive fidelity. It’s the best “Day 1” architect’s assistant I’ve found.
• The Master Debugger (Google’s Gemini): For ongoing development and chasing down complex bugs, Gemini’s massive context window – and its ability to ingest entire codebases via zip files – is a game-changer. The ability to prompt it with, “Here is my entire frontend and backend; find the source of this cross-layer bug,” is a superpower. It can see the whole system, not just the single file, making it an invaluable tool for maintaining a clean architecture.
• The Unexpected Helper (XAI Grok): I would ask an AI to give me instructions do to something I had never done before – and it would produce a high level plan. No details. No contingency. I’d start and fail at the first instruction and I had to re-prompt forever. But Grok is different, I can ask it detailed step by step instructions and it would produce a level of detail and depth I had never seen from an AI.

Don’t get me started on Codex, Claude Code and other agentic token wasters that run around in circles. Right now they’re just alpha software being pushed as an excuse for asking for ever higher subscription prices. They works at that. It is seductive to think “you can leave it to the AI” but in my experience you get the best results when you know your architecture and you verify everything the AI produces before using it.

The Professional Loop: How to Keep the AI on a Leash

The lesson is clear: the model is just a tool. Your process is what determines the quality of the output. The right way to “vibe code” is to set immutable rails for the AI to run on.

1. Plan Before You Prompt.

An experienced engineer can do this in minutes. Before you open the chat window, you must have a clear mental (or physical) model of what you’re building. What are the user journeys? What are the core modules and their responsibilities?

2. Document the Architecture and Context.

The LLM never joins your meetings. You must be its institutional memory. Create a simple, living document that outlines your architectural principles, your naming conventions, and your core domain language. Obsess over clean code and clean architecture. Establish clear rules. Write mappers between domains. You’re not writing them manually, they are just one prompt away. USE THIS.

3. Prompt with Precision and Authority.

Your prompt is a command, not a suggestion.

• Bad Prompt (Vibe): “Hey, can you make an endpoint to get users?”
• Good Prompt (Professional): “Using our established Clean Architecture, create a ‘GetUserUseCase’ in the core application layer. It should take a ‘UserRequestModel’ and return a ‘UserResponseModel.’ Here are the definitions for those models. Adhere to the single responsibility principle. Do not include any database logic in the use case.”

4. Iterate, Test, and Commit.

Build piece by piece. Only after a component is written, tested, and committed to your version-control system do you move on. The source of truth is your Git repository, not your chat history.

Conclusion: You Are the Architect, Not the Prompter

Vibe coding is here to stay. The speed is too seductive to ignore. But the developers who will win in this new era are not the ones who can prompt the fastest. They are the architects who can think with the most clarity.

The AI is a powerful but chaotic force. It is a firehose of code. Without the solid container of a clean architecture and a disciplined process, that firehose will simply flood your project with unmaintainable complexity.

Set the rails first. Then, and only then, let the AI accelerate you down the track.

The AI is a powerful but chaotic force… Without the solid container of a clean architecture and a disciplined process, that firehose will simply flood your project.

It’s a principle that applies far beyond code. A life without a strong internal frame and a guiding philosophy will be similarly overwhelmed by the chaos of the modern world.