if you haven't tried the research -> plan -> implementation approach here, you are missing out on how good LLMs are. it completely changed my perspective.

the key part was really just explicitly thinking about different levels of abstraction at different levels of vibecoding. I was doing it before, but not explicitly in discrete steps and that was where i got into messes. The prior approach made check pointing / reverting very difficult.

When i think of everything in phases, i do similar stuff w/ my git commits at "phase" levels, which makes design decision easier to make.

I also do spend ~4-5 hours cleaning up the code at the very very end once everything works. But its still way faster than writing hard features myself.