After 7 Months of Vibe-Coding, a Dev Rewrites His Kubernetes TUI by Hand

The author spent roughly 30 weekends and 234 commits building k10s, a GPU-aware Kubernetes dashboard written in Go with Bubble Tea, almost entirely through Claude-driven ‘vibe coding.’ Early progress felt like a 10x speedup: prompts produced working pod views, log streaming, command palettes, and even a polished GPU fleet view on the first try. The collapse came when switching back to older views revealed empty tables, stale data, and broken live updates. Reading the code for the first time, he found a single 1,690-line model.go with one god-object struct holding UI widgets, the Kubernetes client, per-view state, caches, and a 500-line Update method dispatching across 110 switch cases.

His diagnosis is that AI assistants reliably ship individual features but cannot maintain architecture across them. Each prompt optimized for the immediate task, special-casing new views inside generic code paths and scattering nine manual nil-assignments to prevent data bleed between screens — a decay pattern invisible from any single prompt. He coins ‘god-object’ as the AI-coding equivalent of the tell-tale em-dash in AI writing.

The takeaway, encoded as tenets for AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md files, is that humans must own architecture and view isolation while letting the model handle feature work. He is archiving the Go v0.4.0 branch and rewriting k10s from scratch, this time keeping himself firmly in the loop.