Readit Newsjoaoqalves commented on Building on vibes: Lessons from three years with LLMs world.hey.com/joaoqalves/... · Posted by u/joaoqalves
I’ve spent the past three years "vibe coding" with LLMs, building side projects I wouldn’t have had time to ship otherwise. Along the way, I’ve learned how to structure context for ChatGPT, utilize PRDs to minimize rework, and address areas of weakness, such as testing.
It doesn’t feel like "magic" anymore, but it does feel like a real productivity boost. Wrote up the reflections + shipped projects in this blog post.
Happy to hear your thoughts and comments.
joaoqalves commented on You can just open-source things world.hey.com/joaoqalves/... · Posted by u/joaoqalves
I’ve open-sourced "SupportHero" [1], a Slack-to-Jira support bot inspired by a similar, internal one, built by a colleague where I work.
The original idea was simple: reacting to a Slack message would automatically create a ticket. This reduced friction for users (“please create me a ticket” was no longer needed), provided platform teams with better visibility into support load, and surfaced real demand. I extended it while leading the Runtime team, then rewrote it as "SupportHero".
For a while, it sat on the shelf: useful, but not perfect. Recently, inspired by the builder mentality I see in projects like DHH’s Omarchy, I decided just to clean it up, write some docs, and release it.
It’s not something I plan to monetize, and it’s not a polished product. But that’s the point: sometimes you don’t need a business plan or a launch strategy. You can simply build things and open-source them.
The code is tested, easy to deploy, and can serve as a base for teams who want to automate away this kind of support overhead.
More details and the backstory in my blog post.
Generally speaking, these folks are empowered to make their lives better and more productive through LLMs. There are a few things to consider, though:
1. It’s not the same a brand new codebase vs a big, existing one. Context management helps, but you also need to invest a lot on it. Especially legacy projects. Bear in mind that producing code is part of the job of a Software Engineer but not the biggest chunk, especially in legacy apps. Observability, setting up good cloud infrastructure, etc is still there. I think there’s also room to improve it with LLMs but we must also acknowledge we’re in the early days, although it does not seem so.
2. When you work for a bigCo, there are tempos. Approvals, budget, licenses… All of this makes the adoption of these tools a bit slower than wanted.
3. Finally, there’s a cultural change. A lot of great SWE, even on HN, despise the idea of having someone writing code for them. “It’s bad code”, etc. We need, as an industry, to make sure we get the most out of the available tools, and be proficient with them. So, this is a more cultural/people’s problems. And these are harder than vibe coding.