What I wish I knew before building a vibe coding platform (imagine.dev)

Ariel, the VP of AI at Appwrite, shares insights from the development of Imagine, a vibe-coding platform that enables users to create production-ready web applications through prompting. This innovative platform integrates complex features such as real backends, server-side rendering, and server functions, allowing for a comprehensive environment for developers. Notably, Ariel emphasizes the crucial role of prompt caching, which can significantly reduce operational costs and improve processing speeds, highlighting that a 90-95% cache hit rate can lower generation costs dramatically, transforming user experience from cumbersome to efficient. Ariel also addresses the importance of architecting for real-world conditions, suggesting the implementation of resumable streams and durable workflows to ensure reliability and minimize data loss. By harnessing tools like Inngest, developers can achieve enhanced observability and resilience in their applications. Additionally, the choice of frameworks plays a pivotal role; the team selected TanStack Start for its SSR capabilities and optimized build times, fundamentally impacting development efficiency. Overall, these lessons underscore that strategic architectural decisions and technological choices should be foundational rather than ancillary to building a successful vibe-coding platform.