A couple weeks ago I got fired up about a small pet project idea. It's a web application, and this is my first experience where I want to overcome the feeling of "this is an unknown stack, I don't even want to go there". This is also my first long-term project (two weeks in free time is already long), which I'm exclusively vibe-coding. Haven't written a single line of code by hand yet, exclusively managerial supervision. And I'm the kind of manager - typical, who pretends to understand all these technical words that the developer tells them.
Some thoughts about vibe coding are forming, possibly even into some meetup talk in the future, so this isn't about that now. For now just imagine that I sketched out some MVP, knowing almost nothing about frontend from a practical standpoint. That is, a stack has already formed there, and some high-level architecture has emerged. There's something already, in short.
But with one eye I still want to look at what it's doing. And I want to get experience, and my gut tells me that problems will start soon. I'll need to understand a bit deeper. So far problems keep not starting and not starting, by the way, waiting. On my native stack I would have already gotten a bit fed up looking at the results.
One of the main blockers that always stopped me from going into unfamiliar stacks is that I don't even know where to approach from. I don't even know how to set up Visual Studio Code so it stops being a notepad. I've never done this. Opened a window expecting comments about WebStorm
This is a really clear indicator of experience for me. Writing code in any language doesn't take much brains. Setting up your environment to get rid of the feeling that everything in this process is inconvenient for you - that's not easy.
An absolutely brilliant idea came to my mind. It's called "Claude Code, set up VS Code for this project for me".
It shamaned something somewhere there, made me install a bunch of extensions that fit perfectly with the chosen stack. Made some tasks, created hotkeys by which they can be run. And, cherry on top, also wrote documentation for me on how to use all this goodness. Otherwise eyes still scatter. Linters, tests, autocompletes of all kinds, hints, everything necessary, in short.
It's an awesome feeling when it just resolved a blocker for weeks for you, explained, and now you've become a bit smarter.