Iterating

A Vibely session can run for hundreds of turns. Most of what makes a long session productive — not exhausting — is in how you iterate, not in how fast the model is. TL;DR

• One change per turn. Revert, don’t patch. Pin invariants you keep re-saying.
• Use Plan Mode before anything that touches 3+ files.
• “Green state” = preview works + latest turn made sense + types clean. That’s when you push to GitHub.

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Keep each turn small

A turn that does one thing is easy to roll back, easy to verify, and unlikely to break anything else. A turn that does five things is the opposite. When you catch yourself writing a prompt with multiple “and”s, split it. Five small turns take less total time than one bundled prompt that fails twice.

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Trust the live preview

The preview reflects every turn within seconds. Click around between turns — don’t wait until you have ten changes stacked up. When something works, say so explicitly:

“Yes — that’s the layout I want. Keep that pattern going forward.”

Confirmations get picked up by future turns. They prevent the agent from second-guessing a good answer.

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Roll back instead of patching

If a turn produces something wrong, the right next prompt is almost always a revert.

“Undo the last change to the orders page and try again — this time use a stacked card layout instead of a table.”

Reverts are clean. Bug-fix-on-top-of-bug-fix prompts accumulate cruft and make future iterations harder.

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Pin invariants early

Once you’re happy with a foundational decision — component library, layout primitive, brand colour, copy tone — write it down. Two places to put it:

• Custom instructions if it’s true across every project you build.
• Memory if it’s true for this project specifically.

The earlier you pin, the less drift you fight later.

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Sync to GitHub when you’re in a green state

Green state checklist — push when all of these are true:

• The preview loads and renders without errors.
• The latest turn did what you asked.
• The code your eyes scanned looked right.
• tsc / lint is clean (or no worse than before the turn).
• You’d be okay with the project ending here.

If a future turn breaks something, branch off the green commit and replay. Don’t treat the Vibely project as your only history. GitHub is your safety net.

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Use Plan Mode for anything risky

When the next thing you’re about to ask for touches more than one or two files, ask for a plan first.

“Plan how we’d switch from a single-tenant data model to multi-tenancy. List the files you’d touch.”

You get a written approach back. Edit, push back, ask for alternatives — until the plan is right. Then “implement it” unlocks the agent’s full toolset. Plan Mode is the cheapest way to avoid expensive mistakes — flat 1 credit per turn regardless of how much it reads.

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Know when to start over

Sometimes the cheapest path forward is a new chat. Heuristics:

• The agent has looped on the same error 3+ turns in a row. Context is poisoned.
• The chat has crossed 100 turns and the agent is contradicting itself. Compaction has eaten too much.
• You’ve changed the brief substantially mid-session. The agent is still trying to satisfy the original brief.
• The architecture you ended up with isn’t the one you’d have asked for. A fresh chat with the lessons from this one usually lands somewhere better.

Starting over doesn’t lose your code — files are stored, the new session restores them. What you lose is the chat context, which at that point is more confusing than helpful. Before starting over, ask the agent:

“Summarise the lessons from this session in 5–10 bullet points I can paste into a new chat.”

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Use comments and visual edits for design tweaks

For visual changes, two faster paths than prompting from scratch:

• Visual edits — click any element in the preview, type a change (“more padding”, “use the brand purple”). The agent patches just that element. No re-think of the design system.
• Pin comments on the preview (Project settings → Collaborators). Prompt “address the open comments” and the agent takes them as a batch.

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