100 Commits and Beyond: The Vibe Coding Journey

I started vibe coding projects as a learning experience to embrace the ever evolving AI-driven future. I continue to learn new tips and tricks daily on how to optimize development workflows for efficiency and effectiveness. My development role continues to evolve from designing and writing resilient code and systems to fine-tuning SKILLS.md and CLAUDE.md docs, finding and implementing tools that reduce AI tokens, and reviewing and testing code. I still get to roll up my sleeves every now and again and write code when it's more efficient for me to including bug fixes that Claude/AI has struggled to properly resolve, but my time in the code has reduced significantly.

If You Build It, You Will Profit (???)

AI has allowed me to create products and start collecting production data to test my pre-defined theories against real world data. My Moonext App has been the test site for a lot of my ideas and has been progressing in various forms in hopes of finding a profitable MLP. I don't want to create products that do not add any value, so a large part of my trials is collecting production data and monitoring for profitable models before I make my public Go-Live.

My first product idea was monitoring and analyzing profitable Solana wallets and tokens to copy-trade with the help of OdinBot Copytrading App. Data and Trading models were built to analyze profitable wallets, token history and validity, token and wallet profitability, among other factors. While the data looked to tell a positive story on the potential profitability, the actual trading told a different story. Real money was lost (luckily not a lot), but the highly-anticipated go-live of my analytics and trading app quickly turned to confusion, data debugging, and empty pockets.

Don't Be Afraid to Pivot

It'd be nice if my original assumptions about a product would have been successful, but that isn't always the case and that's okay. I have a small team of AI agents that are helping me build and test my ideas, which frees me up to analyze production data and test my product ideas.

I don't want to continue to try to force a product to work. I want fast iterations that will fail fast, so I can move onto my next idea with the ultimate end goal of profitability. Once I find the winning recipe for my own use, then I will feel confident enough to open the beta application for others to profit along.

Not every idea is going to be a homerun and profitable, but consistency and perseverance will continue to drive me to create and test products that provide a future passive income stream. The ultimate goal out of all of this is to have my money work for me while I enjoy doing the things that I want to in life, and I'm not stopping until I make it there.

Lessons Learned

1. Instead of testing real-world data with real-world money, I have since implemented paper trading first to test trading models with real-world data first and monitor performance.
2. Github is a treasure trove of every project imaginable with various implementations for a wide array of different theories that others have already built. Not every idea has to be built from scratch. Clone a project, monitor the original performance and iterate based on performance feedback.
3. Choose the right tool for the job. I may revisit my Odinbot Copytrader again in the future with a different stack and framework. I love Ruby on Rails, but it may not have been the best choice for a data-intensive application and there are plenty of other tech stacks that would be a better tool for the job.
4. Keep building. Keep iterating. Monitor the performance and analyze production data to build smarter.