Category: Vibe Coding

Two weeks ago, my team made the call to replace our authentication system. Not because it was broken — it worked fine. But it was holding us back in ways that became obvious only when we tried to move fast. Why We Decided to Change Our original auth was a custom solution built years ago…

I used to reach for useEffect for everything. Data fetching? useEffect. Form validation? useEffect. Syncing state? useEffect. My components looked like chaos, and I couldn’t figure out why my code felt so hard to maintain. Then I learned something that changed how I write React: useEffect is not the answer for most problems. The Problem…

Let me be honest — I used to think error handling was boring. Just wrap things in try-catch and move on, right? Wrong. That mindset cost us hours of debugging at 2 AM. After dealing with enough production fires, I started collecting patterns that actually work. These aren’t theoretical best practices — they’re the things…

For years, I wrapped everything in try-catch blocks. Every function, every API call, every database query. I thought that’s what defensive programming looked like. I was wrong. The Problem with Catching Everything When you catch exceptions at every level, you lose context. You mask real errors. You make debugging a nightmare because you never know…

Why I Ditched the Library For years, I used Auth0, Firebase Auth, and Passport.js without thinking twice. They handled the hard stuff — token management, security patches, OAuth flows. Why reinvent the wheel? Then I joined a startup with a tight budget and a weird requirement: we needed custom auth logic that didn’t fit any…

For years, I was that developer. The one who insisted on 90% code coverage. Who would spend hours writing tests for every function, every edge case, every tiny module. I thought more tests meant better code. I was wrong. The Test Everything Mentality It started when I joined my first proper dev team. The senior…

You know that feeling when you type something into ChatGPT or Cursor, and code just appears? Like magic. No manual. No Stack Overflow scrolling. Just you, typing what you want, and boom — it works. That’s vibe coding. And I decided to try it seriously for a week. What is vibe coding? Basically, it’s writing…

I’ve been revisiting some of my older codebases lately, and something keeps hitting me: most of the problems I solved didn’t need to be solved at all. Looking back at thousands of lines I once thought were genius architecture, I now see complexity that actively hurt the systems I was building. The Engineering Ego Trap…