OpenAPI, microservices segmentation and keeping things small helps a lot. Probably the worst piece of the puzzle is the UI to maintain the coherence but it can be solved.
What's the largest app you've entirely vibe-coded with this architecture? For me, everything fails at a few hundred lines, no matter how micro you keep your services.
Mind you, we're talking zero review at all, just using whatever the LLM produces.
LLMs have an unsolvable problem of "hallucination". It is a bad description of what the problem is because hallucination is all they do, it just also happens to be correct in many cases. The larger the codebase or the problem space, the less accurate LLMs tend to be.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that you need a purpose-built LLM to generate usable UI code. There are ways to use LLMs to increase efficiency and velocity without sacrificing quality, but they're all at the API/backend/service/whatever-you-want-to-call-it level, or in the initial planning stages.
I basically use LLMs to plan work, then to do the backend work with close supervision, then I do all the UX stuff completely on my own.
That's really interesting. I feel like that runs counter to a broader perception that vibe-coding the FE / UX is straightforward, vs more challenging backend stuff. As someone whose 27-year career began with - and remained largely centered around -- client-side / FE / UX, it's of particular interest.
I've "vibe-coded" a few small hobby projects, and use cursor sometimes for professional stuff, and it always collapses for me on "real" front-end tasks. Yeah I can say "give me a layout of a certain style" and it will do reasonably well if it has no existing constraints. But for example, I vibe-coded a UI and then tried to adjust the tailwind theme it picked, and it was an absolute nightmare. You would have thought "change the primary color from A to B, select a new accent color that is darker than what you've selected and is not A or B, and now update the dark theme to be comparable" spread across multiple prompts was one of those crazy 3d animation puzzles you see used as a way to break LLMs.
AI created openapi is like mud house on beach, the first wave will destroy the whole thing into pieces beyond memory can remember it's original ugly shape...
Yeah, I have a rule to tell the agent to not write to any of our OpenAPI specs, it reliably mangles them and then gets stuck trying to unmangle them. I get better results modifying the specs myself and using that as context for the agent so it better understands what I want.