Show HN: I built a wizard to turn ideas into AI coding agent-ready specs (vibescaffold.dev)

71 points by straydusk ↗ HN
I created vibescaffold.dev. It is a wizard-style AI tool that will guide you from idea → vision → tech spec → implementation plan. It will generate all the documents necessary for AI coding agents to understand & iteratively execute on your vision.

How it works: - Step 1: Define your product vision and MVP - Step 2: AI helps create technical architecture and data models - Step 3: Generate a staged development plan - Step 4: Create an AGENTS.md for automated workflows

I've used AI coding tools for awhile. Before this workflow (and now, this tool), I kept getting "close but not quite" results from AI coding tools. I learned that the more context & guidance I gave these tools up front, the better results I got.

The other thing I have found with most tools that attempt to improve on "vibe coding" is that they add abstraction. To me, this just adds to the problem. AI coding agents are valuable, but they are error-prone - you need to be an active participation in their work. This workflow is designed to provide a scaffolding for these AI agents, while minimizing additional abstraction.

Would love feedback on the workflow - especially curious if others find the upfront planning helpful or constraining.

18 comments

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You can already do this in your coding agent ? You just need the LLM to index the code base, and the rest is easy. I need a before-and-after to understand what you are doing differently.

Unless your tool has people skills, this engineer can just take the spec to the agent ;)

I'm happy for you! Some feedback as I walk through the app.

I like the styling, it's really slick. I also like that you enable me to use the tool online without signing up. I was curious about how you're supporting this, and paying for inference, but I see now that you haven't really wired up anything. When I try to generate my 1pager, it returns a placeholder.

> Turn your messy ideas...

I'm not a fan of this framing. Messy has negative connotations, so it's not clear why you're insulting me when we just met. ;)

The wizard:

There's a bit of duplication, since you have "Tell the agent..." as well as "Tell me...", both conveying the same information.

I can jump through steps without competing prior ones. Isn't that going to cause a problem?

It's hard to truly evaluate this further without seeing it in action. As other authors have said, many agents already support Plan Mode, so it it's important for you to distinguish yourself from that.

Hey there, I changed the messy framing. Hope you like it!

I also fixed the wizard text, I agree.

I also fixed the step jumping.

Would love to hear your feedback if you try it again with the fixes in place :)

> It is a wizard-style AI tool that will guide you from idea → vision → tech spec → implementation plan.

(And then the implementation plan is fed to the same sort of AI that you were going to give the "idea" to in the first place.)

If doing this gives good results, then it shouldn't be necessary.

What are you doing that SpecKit/BMAD/etc aren't?
I found SpecKit to be over-engineered, and BMAD to be quite complex. To me, this was a "thin" enough solution that I still felt like I was in control, and not at the mercy of an additional abstraction.
AI can generate specs and development plans but a tremendous amount of trash can slip through those specs and plans resulting in complete garbage as output.

I'm using AI a lot, in planning but I take close manual oversight on specs and development plan and still read all active path code (give AI a little but not too much leeway on testing, since sometimes they start writing test asserting true == true).

I think you're right. I think that's why I like this approach - it's keeping you in the loop for most of it - and you just get documents as output that you can edit, check, and iterate on yourself.
broken.

there's no need for an app like this anyway.

You want this as a series of prompts that handle the various stages.

I like this. I’ve been working on something similar. Good spec’ing is critical to getting good output and I suspect a lot of the “I’ve already got plan mode” comments are from technical HN folk, who do know the right questions to ask and know what good looks like. But as the success of Lovable shows there are millions of people out there who clearly want to build apps but don’t have the technical chops to do so and clearly don’t know what a good spec looks like. My experience of “plan mode” is that it won’t serve these people. I’d be keen to connect and share ideas around this. My email in my profile.
I've been doing something like this for a while, and it provides decent enough results for agents to one-shot. The key is to specify the LLM with the idea, and then get it to ask you questions until you feel enough ambiguity has been eliminated from the product spec for you to pass it to an agent.
Is this still up? I tried to get some ideas on creating AGI, but no AI response came through?
I've never understood why anyone would use a wizard to install software: they are unstable old men with magical powers and they are NOT to be trusted!!!

Now you are going to have one write out instructions for an AI?! I guess we know how the AI apocalypse gets started!

This is really good work! Love the UX and the design. Even though I work with AI agents and building them a lot, I found the way you structure the steps very helpful for thinking about the project itself. The agent asks the right questions which makes me feel confident it's understanding my goals.

If you're looking for feedback, you could include a tiny section on the homepage about how to run the output docs. e.g. put them in a folder, point Claude Code/Codex to it and give it the prompt.

Thanks for building this!