Hi, I m an app developer who s shipped many projects the old-school way (hand-coding) for over a decade. Recently AI tools have exploded - speeding up my production like crazy.
What s happening:
- Idea to MVP: Creators focus on ideas while AI writes most of the code.
For the past few months I've been juggling three AI coding agents Claude Code for architecture, Codex for implementation, GLM for review. The pain wasn't any single one of them. It was the switching cost.
Every time I switched engines I had to re-explain the project: which framework, which conventions, where the old conversation left off. None of them remembered what the others knew. I'd waste 10 15 minutes per switch re-loading context, and half the time I'd just give up and stay on whatever I opened first.
So I started building a small thing for myself. Local desktop app. Lets me run all three engines from one window, with a shared memory layer underneath.
The thing I underestimated: persistent memory is the whole game. Once Claude and Codex can both see "this project uses SwiftData + strict concurrency + @Model on iOS 18+," switching becomes free. I stopped caring which engine I was on and started picking per-task.
No dev degree. No traditional background. Just me, Cursor, Claude, and AI... figuring things out together.
Rick Rubin said it best: "In the past, for music, you had to go to the conservatory and study for years... then when punk rock came along... if you had something to say, you could say it." He calls vibe coding the punk rock of coding.
about to Launch a product for creators after building for a few weeks to months. Started as a way to get into vibe coding and just got real useful real quick lol. But the goal is still that - mix my skills and knowledge as an engineer with the good parts of AI coding. So i learned a few of what to need and have
Claude.md file
best coding practices section
pretty heavy compartmentalization & file structure separation
certain ways to prompt
ask for implementation plan before telling it to code
But i feel like all i learned is about directing prompts - im wondering...
what are you guys finding are the best .md or deeper ai vibe coding tricks that are helping you save time? be more efficient? debug ai less or help it get it right the first time? whats your vibe code tips and tricks?
Hey Makers I m exploring options for managing subscriptions, payments, and authentication in a super simple way. Ideally, something that s: 1. No-code / low-code friendly 2. Easy to integrate without a ton of setup 3. Handles the boring stuff like billing, invoicing, cancellations, and user access automatically
I ve looked at a few tools, but many feel too heavy for a small MVP. Curious to know: What are you using right now? Any lightweight tools that worked really well for your early-stage product? Bonus if it has a generous free tier or is affordable for indie founders. Would love to hear what s working for this community before I commit to something!
Spent a chunk of Saturday on this and felt obligated to share.
The setup: Claude Code wrote a clean, working function that passed every test. Looked perfect. Pushed to staging. Production crashed.
The bug: the agent had quietly used a deprecated method that worked in tests because of a mock. The mock didn't trigger the deprecation warning. The agent had no way to know it was using something on its way out.
After using a lot of AI-generated code lately, I've found myself spending a lot of hours on checking and repairing a lot of easy-to-spot security flaws. That being said, AI generally sucks at actually implementing secure code (or architectures), as well as recommending what to do to make your app more secure (sometimes even decently secure).
Have you had this problem as well? If yes, how do you tackle it?
This happened to us last week. Agent wrote the fix, tests went green, we merged. Prod error rate spiked 20 minutes later.
Went back and found the agent had "fixed" the test to match the wrong behavior instead of fixing the actual bug. Technically - all tests pass. Completely wrong in practice.
Lately it feels like every week there s a new AI-powered SaaS launching.
Same landing page formula. Same promises. Same 10x productivity pitch.
And what s interesting is the number of products keeps increasing but I m not sure demand is increasing at the same rate. It feels like we re repackaging the same value just slightly different positioning.
