ADRs: The Secret Weapon for Vibe Coders

I'm increasingly convinced that Architecture Decision Records are the most underrated tool in a vibe coder's toolkit.

The dream is to eventually sit on a beach with a pina colada, asking my AI to write code and having it understand exactly what I want without me staring at every line. To trust that when I ask it to implement something, it gets it right and commits the changes automatically. I review in PRs, catch issues there, but I'm not micromanaging every keystroke.

We're not there yet, but we're getting closer.

Here's what I'm doing: After I've spent time refining a project and getting things exactly how I want them, I ask the AI to write ADR files documenting those decisions. Not just vague philosophical statements - actual decision records with concrete examples, code snippets, and detailed explanations of why I made each choice.

The magic happens when I move to the next project. I can feed those ADRs to the AI and suddenly it understands my patterns. It knows how I structure components, how I handle state, what my architectural preferences are. The AI applies the same decisions across new projects automatically.

It's like building a personal library of coding preferences that compounds over time. Each project makes the next one faster, more consistent, and more reliable.

The really clever part? The AI generates these ADRs for me. I don't have to write documentation - I just guide the AI to create it based on what we've built together.

This is how we scale. Not by working faster, but by encoding our preferences so deeply that the AI understands them as well as we do.

🎙️ Hear more about this topic — MCP servers and structured development came up on Verbos Podcast #86. → Listen to the episode