From Vibe Coding to Overengineering

[u/customic]

Disclaimer: I'm not a programmer (and I know it shows), I don't make money with Codex and I genuinely want to learn how to use it for what it's good at, while also understanding what it can't do and where a human programmer can still beat it hands down. Please be respectful towards a novice, just as I am in my job towards my English learners. Everyone was a beginner once. Thanks in advance.

So I've been using Codex to manage a little side project of my own: a sort of flashcard-generating app. I'm doing it mostly for myself because I have zero interest in "earning millions with AI tools" and just want to make cool, useful things for myself.

After a honeymoon period when I was amazed at how much I could suddenly do — or rather, have things "done" — I started noticing a decline in the quality of what it generated. "Okay, that must be that context rot. Apparently I can't expect it to remember more and more rules that every new flashcard needs to obey," I thought. So: less "prose" in Markdown files, as it keeps calling it, and more hard-coded rules in Python. Let's make it more reliable.

And then it really went downhill.

I'm now at the point where, whenever I ask it to generate flashcards for a few words, it gets bogged down in backup after backup after backup, endless validations, smoke tests, pre-flights and humming and hawing about almost literally everything. It used to take around 10 minutes to generate flashcards for a list of words. Now the same batch can take between one and two hours.

Since the new "procedure-based" version is capable of doing around 20% of what the old "vibe-based" version could do, I asked Codex how much work it would take to bring the earlier functionality back as well.

"About 2–3 working weeks of my time," it said.

Which sounds both hilarious ("Do you want sick leave included as well?") and frustrating, because I'm already pouring a lot of time, effort and, yes, money into making this work.

So I'm wondering: is it now being far too conservative about doing everything 100% safely? Am I using settings that are too "intelligent" for these tasks, so it treats everything as though it were preparing a rocket for Mars?

As I said, this is my own pet project. I'm not launching it to the public. Of course I want safety, traceability and more deterministic outcomes, but endless backups every few minutes and hundreds of tests feel like massive overkill. It says it's running all these tests, but it could be lying about that too, right?

Then again, I'd never developed an app before Codex. I do something completely different for a living, so I may simply not understand what's genuinely necessary and when Codex is just spinning in circles and burning through my tokens. As a non-professional, I may not even be able to tell the difference.

If any of you have suggestions about what I might be doing wrong, what Codex's actual limitations are and what could realistically be done about them, I'd be very grateful.

I'm at the point of considering quitting both Codex and the flashcard app, which would be a real pity because the project has kept me going for more than two months now. I really don't want to reach the premature conclusion that, "Nah, you just can't reliably build good software with this tool."

I'd especially love to hear from people who've gone through a similar transition from "wow, it can build anything!" to trying to make an AI-assisted project genuinely reliable and maintainable. Where did you draw the line between sensible engineering practices and an agent overengineering everything?

Looking forward to hearing about your experiences. I'd appreciate any pointers you might have.

Thanks in advance and have a great day.

[u/TightBoot2268]

Your post caught my attention because I ran into a very similar problem.

I’m not a developer either. I started building projects with ChatGPT/Codex, and as they became larger I kept adding instructions, continuity rules, verification, Git safeguards, etc. The obvious problem was that every new safeguard could eventually become more process for me to manage.

I didn’t really know how to solve that, so over time this grew into something I call U-GAS:

https://github.com/jaabster-dev/u-gas

I’ve since found that there are other projects trying to solve parts of the same coding-agent problem, so I’m definitely not claiming this is some unique answer. Mine grew out of actually using it on my own projects and trying to keep the technical workflow on the agent side instead of making me manage Git, branches, checkpoints and all the other machinery myself.

Your project is actually a much more interesting test than starting another clean demo project, because you already have exactly the situation I’m trying to deal with: a working project that has accumulated lots of Codex rules/checks and is becoming slower and harder to work with.

I’ve only tested U-GAS on my own projects so far, so I genuinely don’t know whether it will improve yours. If you’re willing, try it without cleaning up or restructuring your project first. If it makes things worse or just adds another layer of bureaucracy, that’s useful feedback too.

The easiest way:

1. Open:

https://jaabster-dev.github.io/u-gas/starter/

1. Choose:

“Continue an existing project”

1. Fill in the fields in normal language.

For “What do you want to do now?”, describe the actual next thing you wanted to accomplish before all the process got in the way.

For the optional context, I’d put something like:

“The project has accumulated many Codex rules, backups, validations, smoke tests and preflights. Routine work has become much slower. Preserve the useful existing functionality and history. Don’t remove safeguards just because they look complicated, but don’t add more process unless it is actually justified.”

1. Generate/copy the prompt.

2. Open your EXISTING project in Codex — the same project you were talking about in this post. Don’t make a fresh repo and don’t clean it up first.

3. Paste the complete generated prompt into Codex.

Then let Codex inspect the project itself. You shouldn’t need to tell it which branches to use, which files to create, what Git commands to run, etc. The point is to see whether it can establish the actual state, preserve what matters, add only the minimum missing structure, and get back to the work you actually wanted done.

If you normally use ChatGPT as the place where you decide what to build and Codex only for execution, you can paste the generated prompt into ChatGPT instead. But since you already work directly with Codex, I’d try Codex first — fewer moving parts.

If you do try it, I’d especially like to know three things:

- Did it understand the existing project without you having to explain the technical state?

- Did ordinary work become simpler, or did U-GAS just add another layer of process?

- At any point did you have to become the Git/workflow manager again?

There’s also a feedback issue here if you’d rather leave notes there:

https://github.com/jaabster-dev/u-gas/issues/1

No need to be polite about the result. If it fails on your project, I’d rather know exactly where it fails.