The Scaffolding Stack for Vibe Coding

Building with AI beyond just giving in to the vibes by building a shared picture of your build with LLMs powering your choice of CodeGen platforms and AI-assisted coding tools

Before you hit the generate button on any of the trendy Vibe Coding platforms or tools you are into lately, you need to have a clear, shared picture of your build with the LLMs powering the coding agent of the CodeGen platform or with AI-assisted coding tools.

What does having a shared picture of your build with LLM-powered AI entail?

It entails having the clarity that can serve you when you decide which building block to integrate among the many that underpin the modern software:

• Identity- whether knowing who a user is should change access, behavior, or capabilities at all.

• Connect- when communication alone is sufficient, using just email or messaging, without the need to work on identity management system integration.

• Running on the Edge- where deterministic logic lives, implementations that trigger dynamic actions, and when that logic can run beyond just the server or cloud running your build.

• Structured Data Storage- what information must be stored so it is not lost between sessions, requests, or future use.

• File & Asset Storage- how files, uploads, documents, and generated assets are stored when they do not belong in rows and columns.

• Payments Processing- beyond just accepting money for a service or product you have on offer, how money maps to access, limits (especially if token-based usage is involved), subscriptions, and entitlements.

• Analytics & Observability- how you gain insight into product usage, user behavior, and the underlying infrastructure running the product.

• GenAI & Intelligence- where AI is genuinely needed to support a product feature, beyond merely integrating AI for the sake of it.

• Scheduled Autonomously Running Tasks- what work runs asynchronously on a schedule, without direct user interaction (including you). No, these are not agents; they are the good old cron jobs. They automatically run commands or scripts at specific, recurring times or intervals.

• Deployment & Scaling- how the product stays reliably available after it is shipped, with room to scale as usage grows.

With clarity on all these, you can spot and decide to slash unnecessary complexity before it leads to hardened technical debt that could have been easily avoided with a bit of foresight, which comes from having a clear picture of what each building block entails.

This is all about building architectural awareness of how a modern software product is wired.

These are the parts that provide the functionality you are accustomed to when using websites and apps.

The building blocks of the modern software as we know it.

Software has been eating the world since the 2010s, and these are the components behind it.

Understanding what these components are, how they are connected, and their role in the software creation process is essential, even now that LLM-powered AI tools are abstracting away most of them.

Knowing when you are ready to rely on them is what the Simple Scaffolding Framework is for.