Vibe Coding in Mid 2026

Around the middle of 2025, I did my first entirely vibe coded project. It was an okay experience at best with the short of it being "I'll stick to being the driver and asking it if needed". It's a year on and it's time to see what's happened since in hands-off generative AI coding for personal projects - specifically a rudimentary Planet Crafter save editor.

GitHub - nikouu/Planet-Crafter-Save-Editor: A rudimentary save editor for the game, Planet Crafter. Move things around and get you or your items unstuck!

A rudimentary save editor for the game, Planet Crafter. Move things around and get you or your items unstuck! - nikouu/Planet-Crafter-Save-Editor

GitHubnikouu

Claude + Superpowers

2026 has been a hot year for Claude vs Codex, with what I see as a loose consensus on Codex being the better architect. Though I'm not willing to go back to two subscriptions - so this project is going to Claude and Superpowers. And Superpowers are, via the GitHub page:

Superpowers is a complete software development methodology for your coding agents, built on top of a set of composable skills and some initial instructions that make sure your agent uses them.

The problem

My friends and I are doing another run in the game (The) Planet Crafter with the DLCs. The game's great, but it has a little bit of jank. Our run was hit by some of that jank and an important death chest ended up under a ramp with no way to get it. It looked really close, it even clipped through the ramp, but after two hours of attempts, it was time to take a new approach.

The games save file is great: a human readable (enough) custom JSON format that has everything on the world: items, players, drops, etc. The solution ended up being to stand above the chest, find a chest with very similar coordinates to me, and then edit the chest's coordinates to my player ones. This effectively gave me a floating chest to take from.

The problem of stuck items or players doesn't seem too uncommon. A quick check on Reddit shows it happens often enough.

Same with Steam:

There doesn't seem to be any map/save editors, or easy modding tools to solve the problem of: "My items or I are stuck, help!". Seeing as I now know it works; it's time to give the community a simple tool to help solve this.

The solution overview

Claude + Superpowers is going to output the following tool with these goals:

• Allows players to teleport themselves to another player, spawn, or custom coordinates
• Allows players to teleport items to a player, spawn, or custom coordinates
• Simple inventory modification

Other goals:

• Written as a C# WASM page
• Hosted on GitHub pages
• Minor SEO
• Simple instructions and interface for players to easily drop their save file in
• Support only the current patch, but written in a way to attempt to still work on later patches - assuming no large breaking changes

Getting into it

So, here's what happened during development.

Revving up Claude

Installing the Superpowers globally (user) and kicking it Opus 4.7 with thinking and max effort. Essentially, I piled on everything in this post so far to kick off the brainstorming session via the Claude Code VS Code extension.

It went, fast. In fact, day 1 was:

1. Design + kickoff - 44 minutes
2. Scaffold build-out - 24 minutes
3. Critique - 3 minutes

While there was the usage limit gap that totalled to a working enough prototype in 71 minutes.

However, day 2 which only marginally performed differently had a lot of UI cleanup/polish, performance improvements, and bug fixes. This totalled 3 hours 17 minutes, and it wasn't done. This is where the autonomous part ended, and the much harder UI and taste work came in. Perhaps this could've been better managed if I knew what UI I was looking for, though I think that's outside of the fun of this project. Day 3 was also a bunch of tinkering and clean up.

Process killing

Sometimes the background server needed to be restarted. Easy enough since Claude spun it up with a background service and can close that out. Though after awhile, Claude kept asking to do taskkill commands via PowerShell for the dotnet process. Had to turn it into a specific rule to not kill the process that way and go back to the original, normal closure.

The occasional leftover folder/file

Now and again, a rogue file would end up in the commit either because it was assumed there would be a .gitignore entry for it, or the clean up didn't happen after the subagent finished. Asking Claude about this particular folder:

Just another thing to watch out for.

Token usage

It was actually pretty cheap to build this, even with max effort and thinking for Opus 4.7. It took about 35% of a weekly USD$20 subscription to get the 80% done and that went quick. However the remaining tweaks are many more asks and a lot more time due to being small tweaks, then checking the UI and some brainstorming on what are good ideas to move forward. I would've been fine to publish an initial version at like 45% of a weekly allowance.

Or in short: tinkers take the longest in time, but fewer in tokens.

Extra features

As always, actually using the thing gives ideas. Extra ideas implemented were:

• Display name rename for the save
• Report a bug on GitHub
• Having a pending edits section
• Undo changes button

All were effortlessly added to the mostly completed work.

2026 Thoughts

This section's for reflecting on the project and what it means in a wider context.

Properly using new contexts

I continued with the same compacted context all the way through, though that's because by the time the first compaction came around, the app was really close to a usable state, and by the second auto compact, the UI was working.

I feel Superpowers would've been too much to break off to do the smaller follow up pieces (you'll hear my opinion in the upcoming 80/20 section) and it worked well enough with Claude's normal memory. Perhaps this is where I could improve, or do things myself - but this is 100% vibe coded.

Similarly, it helped me better get into the hang of putting things in memory, or the global claude.md for constantly repeated things after a compaction.

On the other hand, it loses the task IDs for the server process runs after being compacted. So when I ask to restart, it goes "brother, I lost where I put the process, you must taskkill it for us".

80/20

The 80/20 rule feels stronger than ever. That 80% finishes hella fast with core functionality pretty much done in a few prompts after the Superpowers workflow is done. Just incredible prototyping speed to get to a working thing in just over an hour. I can finally see why people might say that experimenting is so fast that old code can be thrown away.

But that last 20%... Man. The amount of tinkering now feels endless to get things right. I know this is an experiment to do a 100% vibe coded project, even if it wasn't, non-trivial issues would have to be diagnosed from scratch because I haven't seen the codebase before. Yes, this happens if I'm looking at another dev's new code, but the point here is this is my experimental project so it's kind of weird to be a stranger in my own house.

Though I guess if the domain isn't too complex and if we black box ideas-in-and-thing-out; it is looking great for product managers to get their customer-inspired concept out the door asap. Probably execs too, as (hopefully) fast working product managers means happier customers which means more revenue. I assume this is why there have been mass layoffs in the tech sector during the months before this post came out.

On the topic of business, this is a fun little project where I didn't have to think about future maintainability, keeping up with security issues, coordinate with several business areas, adhere to a standard, or go through PR reviews. So coding-wise, it was much faster from zero to something as it is personal.

What was left for me?

I enjoy coding though I understand a lot of software engineers actually don't (this is separate from those who enjoy the problem solving aspect more). But what was left over for me to do was manual testing by running the game with modded save files to see if things worked. That's not the fun part for me, the coding is.

Overstepping

I'm sure overstepping can be tuned, though probably not eliminated as any guardrails are suggestions at best due to how LLMs work, but part of that 20% tinkering mentioned previously results in replies like this:

Honest answer: I overstepped. You asked for templates and a link from the page; the Reddit contact_links was something I added unprompted. Two problems with it:

1. You didn't ask for it, and it routes your users to a community you don't run.
2. I assumed r/PlanetCrafter is the right place without verifying.

The only useful thing in config.yml is blank_issues_enabled: false (forces the chooser instead of letting people open a blank issue and skip the templates).

The original prompt asked for a GitHub issue template, as we were talking about issues, but I got:

1. Feature request template - unwanted
2. Issue template
3. config.yml referring to the subreddit for some reason - unwanted:

contact_links:
  - name: Planet Crafter community subreddit
    url: https://www.reddit.com/r/PlanetCrafter/
    about: For general game help, modding chat, or questions that aren't about the editor itself.

Performance as UX

Performance as bundled with user experience is a hard one to do (similar with a11y concerns). The website was straining on every action with a small-mid sized save because every action was enumerating through thousands of lines of the save file. Easy enough to catch as a human while developing, but obviously difficult for an LLM. But on the other hand, easy for an LLM to improve once pointed out. I guess as long as there's some sort of UX (i.e. the thing humans have to interact with) there probably needs to be human glue somewhere in the SDLC.

Token prices

2026 feels like the beginning of token price correction. If you've been around, you might've seen the comment that a USD$200 Claude Code subscription was worth USD$2000-5000. That was March 2026 and by nearly May 2026, both Anthropic and GitHub Copilot subscriptions have changed to be less favourable the consumer. Let's look at the Copilot changes, specifically around model multipliers. We see increases across the board, but dramatic increases for some:

Similar to early Uber, I guess burning cash to become the dominant player that everyone relies upon is still the winning(?) strategy.

Glad I could try this project before it got too expensive!

To conclude

Undeniably quick to get things off the ground - like nothing else. Similar to the last vibe coding post, I continue to lament moving further away from the code and it seems I'm the minority here when summing up anyone who has a stake in coding output.

Imagine being able to do a 30 minute walk to work through a lovely neighbourhood then urban forest. Great for mental wellbeing, the good air, nice candid shots of nature, and the birds tweeting. But what if there was a 10 minute version via heavily trafficked four lane roads, all cracked concrete, and rusty signs. For me and perhaps others, I'd say the lovely walk wins out... Until the first time a more hasty trip is needed to make an appointment. After that the next 10 minute trip comes around sooner and sooner until the 30 minute walk is a rarity. This is how I feel about using generative AI for these sorts of fun personal projects. Yes I do not need to use them for my personal projects (wonderful nature), but the ease of getting something out the door eventually wins (grotty city). Human nature I guess 🤷

Let's see what 2027 brings to this space. Will personal projects be the only time to code as Opus 5.6 has taken all the dev, management, marketing, etc roles? Will tokens to be so prohibitively expensive that generative AI is only used to replace execs? Perhaps cheap models start to be "good enough" to be used as daily drivers instead? We'll wait and find out together 👀