Three things that changed since I wrote about vibe coding my portfolio in 4 days.
In September 2025, I wrote about vibe coding my portfolio in 4 days. Seven months and more than a dozen projects later — web apps, data science work, automation pipelines, AI agents — three things have changed.
Sequence beats questions
The Sep 2025 me had a list of “questions to ask before building.” That was right but incomplete. The actual lesson is that vibe coding works brick by brick, in this order:
- Idealization — key features + user flow. Don’t touch code yet.
- UI/UX frontend — build the screens before the logic.
- Features that link to the frontend — wire backend behavior into screens that already exist.
- Test the features — does it actually work end-to-end?
- Security + final checks on the frontend — auth, permissions, edge cases.
- Deployment — monorepo or separate repos? Where to host? The earlier you decide, the less restructuring later.
When I skip the order, the project gets messy fast — things stop working and I spend longer debugging than I did building.
The right tools beat raw prompting
Sep 2025 me was prompting LLMs from scratch for design and fighting the output every step. Now I lean on:
- Claude design tools for components and layouts
- Stitch for UI scaffolding
- Frontend designer skills with pre-loaded design conventions
- Playwright MCP for UI/UX checking — the model can actually see what it built and iterate without me being the screenshot pipeline
The output is cleaner, more consistent, and I argue with the model less. The tool you reach for matters more than the prompt you write.
What still needs work
Writing better code and designing better architecture. I can ship a v1 of anything in a weekend, but my code tends to be functional rather than clean. That’s the difference between something that works and something that holds up.
The build sequence is figured out. Code quality and architecture aren’t — that’s what I’m working on next.