Tripplanner, a case study of (not) vibe-coding
2026
With the introduction of LLMs and coding agents in our profession, it’s no doubt that our way of working is changing. As a case study, I have a few projects which I never got to, but seem more feasible now. One of these is tripplanner, an Android app to organize and plan a trip (itinerary overview, document management, lists and reminders, etc).
These are my observations:
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A single prompt to create an app, and then a conversation to fix bugs does not work well. It works better to divide the work in phases, where each phase is a finished app with defined features, where each bug is handled already. Defining a phase from a simple description is sufficient, but letting the agent work out a detailed description and an implementation plan before any coding removes a lot of ambiguity and significantly increases code quality. Reviewing these docs is also easier and faster than reviewing code, and it stays necessary.
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Separating in distinct phases also helps to focus on specific tasks, instead of merging them all together. It helps to have a phase for code review, security review, documenting, refactoring without feature changes, and so on.
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Dividing implementation in separate blocks reduces required context. Each new block is a new context, with the design docs and the existing code as reference where needed. No need to add the context of unrelated features, this only costs tokens.
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Coding agents tend to go on wild goose chases. It’s important to keep being familiar with the code to some extent, and interfere when things go sideways. I also let the agent stop after each feature, to do a quick manual check, and to commit the code to git.
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And certainly run everything in a docker container, so the amount of possible damage is limited and repaired easily when things go wrong.
I do not believe that coding agents will replace software engineers any time soon, but I do believe the job changes, and we’re better off by using them.
All the code is here: https://github.com/pgoorts/tripplanner, and the instructions used here.