How I got out of vibecode hell

I've been living in cursor and these are my best tips from what I've learned.

I start every conversation with a prompt like this so that the chat can have the context it needs.

"read the part of codebase that relates to [X] and tell me how it works and how it relates to [thing i want to fix]. Explain to me how everything works and break down the entire thing. bottom up explanation"

Then, when I want to implement a feature I use this prompt, and i usually repeat this exact prompt multiple times in the chat to reinforce it.

"You are a senior engineer focused on clean, efficient code. Write minimal, un-over-engineered solutions. Always analyse existing code before integrating changes and verify all affected components. Prioritize readability, maintainability and ALWAYS remember we want less lines of code for the most efficient outcome."

Most importantly when debugging, AI hallucinates the most when debugging so its really important to diagnose a problem correctly. This exact prompt helps me do that and it works excellently.

"Reflect on 5-7 different possible sources of the problem, distill those down to 1-2 most likely sources, and then add logs to validate your assumptions before we move onto implementing the actual code fix"

Also, a really important tip is to use dictation as its 2-3x faster than typing. I use Seraph which lets me dictate superfast but it also has shortcuts to save all the above prompts and reuse them instantly. This alone made me 3x faster in Cursor