Im going back to writing code by hand

09 May, 2026

This dev-log is getting a lot of attention on HN (scary!): HN Thread.

To those who are coming here from HN: This started as an investigation or rather a question: "How far I can get with building a piece of software by keeping myself completely out of the loop". The tl;dr of this dev log is that I still need to be in the loop to make anything meaningful. Take aways:

    like "em-dash" is to ai writing, "god-object" is to ai coding
    vibe-coding makes everything feel cheap and you may end up losing focus and building bloat
    let a human (you) write the architecture and don't just keep asking it for features
    And some AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md directives that I felt help me stay out of the loop a little more

Humans intervention is still needed as of 10/05/2026. You can totally go back now!
I

Here is k10s: https://github.com/shvbsle/k10s/tree/archive/go-v0.4.0

234 commits. ~30 weekends. Built entirely on vibe-coded sessions with Claude, whenever my tokens lasted long enough to ship something.

I'm archiving my TUI tool and rewriting it from scratch.

k10s started as a GPU-aware Kubernetes dashboard (and my first foray into building something serious with AI). Think k9s but built for the people running NVIDIA clusters, people who actually care about GPU utilization, DCGM metrics, and which nodes are sitting idle burning $32/hr. I built it in Go with Bubble Tea [1] and it worked.

For a while... :(

I learned over these 7 months is worth more than the 1690 lines of model.go I'm throwing away. And I think anyone doing serious vibe-coding can benefit from this, because this part doesn't surface much (I feel it gets buried under the demo reels and the velocity wins).

tl;dr: AI writes features, not architecture. The longer you let it drive without constraints, the worse the wreckage gets. The velocity makes you think you're winning right up until the moment everything collapses simultaneously.
II
vibe coding high

I started k10s in late September 2025. The first few weeks were magic. I'd prompt Claude with "add a pods view with live updates" and boom, it worked. Resource list views, namespace filtering, log streaming, describe panels, keyboard navigation. Each feature landed clean because the project was small enough that the AI could hold the whole thing in context.

The basic k9s clone took maybe 3 weekends. Resource views for pods, nodes, deployments, services. A command palette. Watch-based live updates. Vim keybindings. All working, all vibe-coded in single sessions. I was building at maybe 10x my normal speed and it felt incredible.

Then I wanted the main selling point.

The whole reason k10s exists is the GPU fleet view. A dedicated screen that shows you every node's GPU allocation, utilization from DCGM, temperature, power draw, memory. Not buried in kubectl describe node output, but right there in a purpose-built table with color-coded status. Idle nodes in yellow. Busy in green. Saturated in red.
