If You Gonna Vibe Code, Try This

When Andrej Karpathy first coined the term vibe coding, its defining feature—not even looking at the code—was new and felt reckless. As such, vibe coding was clearly different than agentic software engineering.

These days? With the right setup (guardrails, tests, instructions, etc.) you really don't have to look at the code anymore and it is decidedly not reckless. I'm typing this newsletter into a note-taking software called Tolaria, created by Luca Rossi. He has great write-ups about his agent coding workflow, and manual code review is not part of it.

An AI tool for the rest of us

Still, Luca is a software engineer with a long pre-AI career and all the good sense and judgment that comes with that. Setting up the various quality monitors and gates is a hard engineering task, too. So, what if you want to use AI responsibly but don't have all this judgment?

For something that's a step up from merely asking Claude, Loveable, and co for the app of your dreams, I recommend nWave. If you're working with Claude, it installs as a set of plugins and commands that drive a proper software development lifecycle, starting all the way at the top with a validation of the problem, i.e., is it even worth solving? I've used that /nw-discover command countless times and found that a tool already existed that did what I needed.

What's neat is that it makes a lot of good, opinioated choices about software architecture and development methodology that are already far ahead of what the average dev shop would do.

And before a single line of code is written, it assesses the validity of the idea and runs you through the user experience design steps as well.

If there's a small side project or tool you've ever wanted to build but found a lack of skill and/or time, give it a try and let me know how it goes.