Don’t hesitate to restart vibe-coded projects when needed
There is something interesting I tried yesterday. I restarted my software project - I am building a smart web crawler. In software projects, a full restart is not an easy option even when we know we have learned from our current project and the project now has many layers of code that make it hard to sometimes navigate it. The crawler project was not quite so hard but I kept think “the cost to restart maybe zero and I may get to focus on my successful experiments a lot better”.
A leaner project helps sometimes but when software development costs human $/hour, we hesitate to restart. With vibe coding, I felt I should restart to see if I get a cleaner project. And it worked! In one day, I was able to restart with fresh GitHub issues, and then passing them on to Claude Code. I could get back to a working state, with tests and (in my opinion) better state of software flow than what I had built over the last 3-4 weeks.
Here are some takeaways I have till now (Claude Code based):
A project management workflow with tickets/issues works really well, just like usual software development process
Use Git branching to experiment on ideas and merge or not (if you want to throw an experiment)
Use git worktrees if you want to work on multiple tasks in parallel - more advanced, I do not use this
Use Claude.me to document your software workflow, code formatting, linting standards, etc.
Ask Claude to follow Claude.md when tackling tasks - Claude Code can access GitHub issues, manage branches, etc.
With enough clarity, if you feel the project has many remnants of experiments, do no hesitate to restart parts or all of it
Happy building!
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Claude has context size limitations. But we overcame them with proper api doc and code context documentation with Gemini. Claude sonnet 4 is creating complex in-app screens for our SaaS apps, provided proper context summary and project outline doc.
We never skip documenting every development and design steps. It has helped us use any tool, as long as we have proper work context. Every AI model has become a freelancer off-the shelf now.
@mosymimi Thank you! Yes the documentation at each step helps. The context size limits affect existing projects. With new projects, we can create the documentation for LLMs from the start and it reduces the need to load the entire project if the documentation is split nicely.
I never really like the idea of being a product manager but with AI generated code, I am playing the role of product manager more than anything else.
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@brainless like "source of truth" for the current context.
Ok. this is probably the most convicting post I have read on PH. I don't think i did a complete restart once before except for design work. Makes so much sense.
@howell4change ha ha I guess it takes some time to accept that in vibe coding the cost structure is very different. I am interested in understanding the actual compute costs since I do not want investor money to be used to damage the environment simply because we can.