👾 How to Vibe Code in Production Without Breaking Things

Key insights of the Code w/ Claude event from Anthropic on the best practices of vibe coding.

What Is Vibe Coding?

It's defined as "where you fully give into the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists". The key is forgetting the code itself, while still understanding the product.

Why Should You Care?

The length of tasks AI can perform is currently doubling every seven months.

While engineers can still review hour-long tasks today, soon AI will generate days or even weeks of work. It will become impossible to keep up by reviewing every line of code manually.

To leverage this exponential growth, engineers must learn to responsibly trust AI-generated code, similar to how developers eventually trusted compilers without reading the assembly output. Otherwise, engineers risk becoming a bottleneck and missing out on the capabilities of future models.

How to Vibe Code in Production Responsibly?

Be the AI's Product Manager (PM): Instead of asking "what AI can do for you," ask "what you can do for AI".

• Treat the AI like a new junior engineer: provide comprehensive guidance, context, requirements, specifications, and constraints.

• This often involves spending 15-20 minutes collecting information and building a plan with AI, exploring the codebase, and identifying files and patterns.

• You need to be able to ask the right questions

Focus on Leaf Nodes: Apply vibe coding primarily to "leaf nodes" in your codebase – parts of the system that nothing else depends on.

• It's acceptable for these parts to have some technical debt because they are less likely to change or have other features built upon them.

• The core architecture (branches and trunks) still requires deep human understanding and protection to ensure extensibility and flexibility.

Think About Verifiability: Design your systems and changes so you can verify correctness and stability without needing to read every line of code.

• Strategies include writing acceptance tests, using the product to ensure expected behavior, spot-checking key facts, and designing systems with easily human-verifiable inputs and outputs

Security Considerations: For production systems, the engineer needs to know enough about the context to understand what is dangerous or safe.

Test-Driven Development (TDD): TDD is very useful in vibe coding.

• Encourage the AI to write minimalist, general, end-to-end tests (e.g., happy path, error cases)

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