You can't vibe code your way to success. You can get a proof of concept, a demo, something that does exactly what it says on the tin. That part is actually insane... Then reality kicks in, here's what happened:
A few weeks ago I started building the Agent Control Room - an orchestration layer for running teams of autonomous Claude Code agents. The original version was vibe coded with a twist: I already had a load of bash scripts in place, a bunch of Claude Code skills and processes, and I knew roughly what I wanted to build. But I wanted a proof of concept as quickly as possible, so I let it rip: Vanilla JS frontend, coordination logic all in bash, agents spawned fire-and-forget with SSE pushing updates back to the UI. It did exactly what I described... Agents were running, tickets were being picked up, work was getting done.
The minute I tried to extend it, it fell apart.
Silent failures, agents fighting over the same tickets, repeated PRs and wasted tokens - work being done twice over because nothing actually knew what anything else was doing. It was built on sand, and I knew it.
So I did what any normal human being would do (and like I do with all of my processes): I tore it to absolute pieces and started again.
Proper research on background process communication. SSE out, WebSockets in - a real two-way channel where the orchestrator and agents actually talk to each other. Vanilla JS out, React and TypeScript in. Bash coordinator replaced with a proper Node.js orchestration layer backed by SQLite. Stopped trying to mess around with running everything through Windows bash processes and built something I can throw in a Docker container and deploy properly.
The agents stopped fighting over tickets, the silent failures disappeared, and the whole thing stopped falling over.
Look, without the experience behind me I'd have kept hammering on the vibe-coded version, gone around in circles, got frustrated, and eventually thrown it away. The vibe coding part was genuinely useful - I knew what I had, and I knew what it could become. But I had to apply everything I've learned over my career to build something actually worth shipping.
Vibe coding gets you to the idea, engineering gets you the rest of the way.
Drop a comment if you want to see what it became.