What Three Months of Building a Site with Vibe Coding Taught Me: A Summary of Technical, Design, and Operational Insights
About This Article
About three months have passed since I started building AI Learning Playground. This article looks back at that period of building a site with Vibe Coding and organizes what I learned across three phases: technical, design, and operational.
I cannot say honestly that Vibe Coding is simply easy or simply hard. I will try to describe as specifically as I can which parts took time and which parts went more smoothly than expected.
Technical Phase: AI Writes Code Quickly, but Conveying Intent Takes Time
The first month was the technical phase, where I built out the Astro + Starlight environment together with the AI.
While AI generates code quickly, conveying precisely what I wanted took time. With an instruction like “make the navigation support multiple languages,” the direction the AI took varied slightly each time. I had to work through each prerequisite one by one — which language to treat as the base, how to structure the URL, what to display when a translation is missing — and then build the instruction around those conditions.
What I learned from this experience is to organize the conditions first and then give the instruction in the form of “write code that achieves this behavior under these conditions,” rather than just “please write code.”
Design Phase: Investing Time in the Harness Made the Later Work Easier
The second month focused on building out the “harness” — CLAUDE.md and the shared rule files — that structures how I give instructions to the AI. Progress during this phase was not visible in the same way, and I sometimes worked through it wondering whether it was really necessary.
By the third month, however, the effect of having built the harness became clear. The AI no longer needed to re-confirm the same things every time, and the amount of instruction required decreased. Adding a single note like “this rule is written in CLAUDE.md” became enough for the AI to refer to it and respond correctly.
Investment in design can look like wasted effort at first. But when there is work that repeats over the long term, that investment can be recovered later.
Operational Phase: Maintaining the Site Was Harder Than Building It
Looking back over three months, the hardest part was not building but maintaining.
Writing articles consistently, keeping the harness updated, periodically reviewing the changes the AI made to the code. None of these are things that only need to be done once — they require continuous effort.
Keeping article quality consistent proved more demanding than I had initially expected. Writing a single article to completion can be done in a short time, but keeping consistency across articles, verifying that translations match the originals, and updating information that has become outdated all accumulate.
The Most Important Insight from Three Months
What took the most time with Vibe Coding was not the coding itself — it was improving the precision of the instructions.
Clarifying in my own mind what I wanted to build, conveying that intent accurately to the AI, and verifying that the generated result matched the intent: the quality of this sequence of steps is directly connected to the efficiency of the overall work. I have come to feel that the ability to put into words what I want — rather than the ability to write code — matters more in Vibe Coding.
What I Plan to Do in the Next Three Months
- Further develop the harness, especially around automating the review process
- Improve the accuracy of multilingual article handling
- Build a mechanism for reflecting reader feedback into article updates
I will continue writing articles based on actual experience.