Tips that helped MOST having no prev. dev. experience

Vibe coders and real devs alike, i'd like your input.

What in my tips would you challenge or offer better approaches? Add your thoughts and ideas - i wanna make a master doc of community endorsed and generated tips to share with you all here. If interested in the final version say "interested" and i'll respond to your comment with the document when ready.

Hope this is helpful for anyone a step or two behind me. I'm about 2 months in, no previous software experience.

1. Spend more time planning than implementing.

   * A) Starts with your architecture. Break it down into pieces. Share your vision and goals with agent to produce a comprehensive plan. Understand what each part of the plan means. Look for inconsistencies. Copy each line you don't understand and paste it in a document in quotes with your questions and pros/cons of adjustments.

   * B) Feed new redlined document back to LLM in one go to adjust. Dont do it one by one and waste tokens on every alteration - chunks are better.

   * C) Create a mark down file of "best practices" for software dev, including restrictions on LOC per file, maintaining modularity, etc. Ensure this is uploaded in your agent or repo for the agent to always reference before implementation.

   * D) whatever your architecture is, make sure you're building systematically..ie backend before front end, etc.

   * E) include open source models that are doing something similar to a feature or project youre building and point you agent to those to explore how to integrate. Or use those similar open source models as a starting point then tweak. You'll start off on an incredibly better foot than trying to do from scratch.

2. Have the same flow for features

   * A) plan with your agent to produce a document with said plan, inspect each suggestion, clarify, challenge adjust. agents do better with many well planned & organized logical tasks than doing things one at a time.

   * B) Make a google doc with a tab for each feature, current and in the past. Create to do lists for each feature tab, fixes for bugs you encountered, helpful commands that are defined for you to return to.

   * C) feed your agent generated plan to execute. more efficient than trying to prompt on your own. the AI knows how best to talk to itself.

3. Working with branches

   * A) Avoid branch ADHD - create a branch for a specific implementation. Do all of the work for developing and debugging on this branch till it works as you intend. Reference your google doc feature tab to ensure you complete what you need to complete before moving on. Dont get in a trap of building unrelated features causing your agent to create many branches because you will get lost in the weeds and add more work when you need to cherry pick from branches or integrate them and find you don't know whats causing an issue or why something is working.

   * B) When you're happy with a branch, create a staging branch to see how it works with main BEFORE merging. Dont merge without doing this and screw up your repo because something wasn't reconciled or conflicted then spend days trying to find a fix.

   * C) staging branch should be cleaned

4. Debugging

   * A) dont just say "this thing isn't working." copy and paste or screenshot logs and errors directly to your agent to know what it needs to do. Your markdown file of "best practices" should include how to deal with bugs - ie dont touch unrelated files unnecessarily.

   * B) ask your agent to add debug logs in your terminal and in your devtools panel. Don't assume you know why, or that your agent knows why something isnt working. Add debug logs so you can systematically rule things out.

   * C) if you're stuck, ask your agent to lay out (in plain language) all of the relevant items in the pipeline for the broken feature or issue so you can start making guesses as to which part may likely be the root of the issue. Verify with console and dev tools debugging when you can.

   * D) trying to fix bugs when you don't know what youre really trying to fix adds unnecessary lines of code and will make things worse if you continue blindly.

5. Persistence!!!

   * its easy to get burned out from running into issues and feeling like you need a real dev to do your work. you could always do that, but you could also just be more systematic, remember that you're learning about software development and not off loading everything to an agent and keep at it. Start over if you need to. but keep going. Helps to build something that will solve a big problem for YOU so you stay engaged, rather than something that MIGHT be cool to make money from but actually isnt all that relevant for you.

If you made it this far - i commend you.