I vibe coded a website and I spent half of my time doing quality checks

I took advantage of free Lovable credits on Sunday to get a vibe coded prototype of a resource that I've spent the past 6 years building in Notion.

Partly, I was curious on how easily I could replicate a resources with thousands of sources. Another part, Notion, these days is annoying me for what I use it for, I was curious on whether Lovable could be a better solution going forward.

What was I building? A website of a collection of thousands of links, tools, communities, etc that I've built up over the years. I was particularly keen to make it more user-friendly, improve search...and of course a splash of rainbow vibes to it. Honestly, my face lit up when I turned the cards into shades of rainbow pastel colours. I'm such a sucker for these things. The image above is a screenshot of it.

First up, I had so much fun. I love how this can really enable people to build. It was quick and easy to get something up. I felt empowered. I had CSV files to upload, when I had problems with images I made an attempt at scraping, which worked for smaller scale things, not so much for larger requests.

My prompting skills could be improved. As I was experimenting I realised in hindsight how I should've been more specific. At times I thought I was, it was only afterwards where I saw problems occur that I could've done better.

I spent half of my time doing quality checks. It felt fun to ask the AI to fix the problems I saw. I made change and fix requests like I make requests to our dev team, conversational and in the hope that they understand what I mean. It did feel risky and I felt uncomfortable along the way. A lot of it worked. A lot of it took iterations to get right.

My lack of confidence started to rise to the top. I had my quality hat on. I found myself spotting problems, fixing them, considering the risks and implications.

The shift to AI is about confidence building. I'm sure there are solutions to my concerns. I haven't spent that much time digging into it. I would like to. This is a small scale thing. I can only imagine the stress levels that would arise with bigger and more complex systems. It's easy to rush ahead, but not at the cost of lack of confidence. In a sense, quality is team confidence. We have to find ways to find pace, and ship in a way that makes us feel more confident.

What stuck with me was what I was noticing. I was spending alot of time doing 'quality things'. I guess this won't always be the case, but it's almost like quality hasn't caught up with the coding side. And that's important. Building isn't just about coding. There are other roles that are equally important that need to be considered for.

Will it look different? Sure, most likely, but it's almost like all other roles have been shifted-right in favour of an over glorification of shipping code fast.

Watch out people!