Context Before Code: An Experience Report on Vibe Coding in Practice

TL;DR

This paper reports on practical experiences with vibe coding in a production environment, highlighting its benefits in accelerating development and the challenges in ensuring architectural constraints and isolation are properly enforced.

Contribution

It provides an empirical account of applying conversational code generation with contextual prompts and constraints in real-world software engineering, emphasizing architectural considerations.

Findings

Vibe coding accelerates scaffolding and integration tasks.

Generated code often under-specifies isolation and infrastructure constraints.

Architectural design and verification are crucial for production reliability.

Abstract

Code-generating tools are increasingly used in software development, yet experience reports on conversational "vibe coding" under production constraints remain limited. This paper presents an experience report from a small full-stack team that applied contextual prompting and explicit architectural constraints to build (i) a multi-project agent learning platform designed for sustained, production-oriented use and (ii) an academic retrieval-augmented generation system. The agent platform supports multiple isolated projects, each with structured memory and background processing, thereby enforcing project-level isolation. The RAG system provides citation-grounded answers, role-based access control, and evaluation tracking. Across both systems, vibe coding accelerated scaffolding and integration. However, the generated code often under-specified isolation rules and infrastructure constraints when these were not explicitly defined. Consequently, aspects such as multi-tenancy, access control, memory policies, and asynchronous processing required deliberate architectural design and verification. We observe a shift in engineering effort from boilerplate implementation toward constraint specification and enforcement auditing. We also identify recurring architectural "non-delegation zones" where conversational code generation remains insufficient for production reliability.