AI writes the code. What's keeping track of what you're actually building?
by•
Vibecoding gave me speed, and quietly took something back. A clear picture of what I'm actually building.
I can see every diff. The AI ships feature after feature. But when I zoom out, I've lost the thread. What's really in here now, how the pieces fit, whether I'm still heading where I meant to go. The commits tell me what changed. Nothing tells me what it means, or where it's quietly drifting.
When I wrote everything myself, that map lived in my head for free. Now the code moves faster than my understanding of it, and the gap keeps widening.
So for people building fast with AI: what keeps you oriented? A tool, a ritual, or do you just trust the diffs and hope the shape holds?
5 views
Replies
a CLAUDE.md file basically does that job for me now, forces me to write down the shape of the thing before an agent touches it. still goes stale the moment I stop updating it, same as the map in my head used to