Slowing Down to Speed Up with AI

I am back at JuniorDevSG this July, and this time I get to open the meetup as the first speaker. I want to talk about something I got wrong.

For three weeks I vibe coded a new product flow at work. It looked fine in the browser, so I never read the diff. Then the backend arrived, I finally read the code, and found five different components rendering the same pricing card. Whatever time I saved up front, I lost cleaning it up.

So I changed how I work. AI is fast at the doing. The slow part is still mine: deciding what to build, and reading what it shipped. Slow down in those two places and you speed up.

I shared a version of this at SMU .Hack last month, and I am glad to bring it back to the JuniorDevSG community. See you on July 14.

Vibe coding feels incredible. You describe a feature, it appears, and you keep going. It looks right in the browser, so you stop reading what the AI wrote.

AI is fast at the doing. The slow part is still yours: deciding what to build, and reading what it actually shipped. That part did not get less important. It got more important, because now a bad decision gets built in an afternoon instead of a week.

I learned this the hard way. At work I started a new product flow, home to listing to detail page. There was no backend yet, so it was almost all front-end on mock data. I vibe coded it for three to four weeks. No real plan, and I never read the diff. It looked fine, so I kept shipping.

Then the backend arrived and my front-end had to merge in. I finally read the code, and I did not recognize it. Five different components were rendering the same pricing card. I read, refactored, found more, refactored again. Whatever time I saved up front, I lost cleaning it up.

So I changed how I work. Now I slow down in two places. Before I hand the work to AI, I get clear on what I actually want. That is not extra process, it is the cheapest place to catch a mistake. The same goes for reading the diff myself before anyone reviews or deploys it. This runs through everything I do now, at work and on side projects, from that cleanup to the repetitive workflows I turned into skills.

None of this needs a complicated setup. Learn 20% of a language and you can say 80% of what you need. AI is the same. Pick one tool. Run Explore - Plan - Code - Commit. Keep an AGENTS.md. Build skills for what you repeat. That is what you will walk away with.