With a keen heart on building products, I always have strong interest in coding. Vibe coding make this a reality for me who does not have strong technology background. Recently, I have intensively used a few AI dev tools, namely:
- Replit
- v0 by Vercel
- Cursor
Some yet to try but are highly praised based on my research:
- Lovable
- Bolt
Projects #
So far I have shipped 2 projects:
- Elite Copilot’s landing page for our google ads campaign shipped with replit + cursor
- Boke Tools order management platform for my friend’s company internal use (at beta stage) shipped with v0.
My Thoughs #
Just like any other tools, they are good at their own strength. Thus, I would not recommend or rank the tools without knowing your specific need. But I can say I had good experience with both replit and v0, I think they excel at creating a quick prototype with decent design of your project for preview purpose.
And that is their biggest strength, they are greate tools to get started with (for someone don’t know much about programming), but I would not recommend to stay with them too long.
A Better Approach #
A better apparoach is to use Cusor to work with code. Once you have the scafolding ready, I would suggest to download the codebase and use Cursor instead. We should learn to develop the basic skills to have more control to the product you are building.
Some key skills you need:
- Terminal basics & command line
- Git & source control
- Reading code & effective debugging
- Deployment workflows
- Core technical fundamentals (APIs, storage, AUTH)
All these skills you can learn for free online or even get AI to teach you.
With that said, I am still learning to master Cursor. Currently I find it difficult to set up a project with cursor from scratch, i.e. it encounters difficulties in setting up dependencies correctly. Hopefully I can expand my learnings into a seperate blog post soon.
Tips #
Tip
Most importantly, we must always extract lessons from projects, even they were run on autopilot. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of shipping a product. You don’t truly own it until you know it!
Some of my learnings through out the experiences:
- You can spend some time to discuss with Claude or ChatGPT to align on the project requirement, and overall implementation plan through a few rounds of iteration. (For example, discuss with GPT on the most recommended tech stack for your specific project).
- Ask Claude or ChatGPT to output the project requirement, implementaion plan, and a TODO list in markdown format.
- Feed the documents to the AI dev tools for a easier kickstart and yield satisfactory result in fewer iterations.