Vibe coding is great! But we don't need to build anything from scratch.

Vibe coding with Claude is addictive. You describe what you want, Claude writes it, you iterate. It feels productive. But here's what I learned the hard way: You're often reinventing wheels that have thousands of GitHub stars.

That's why I have build a "Don't Reinvent the Wheel" skill, namely programming-advisor. It triggers whenever I say things like: "I want to build a...", "Help me create...", "Can you code...".

Before Claude writes a single line of code, it searches for existing solutions and show me a comparison table.

For example, when I ask "I want to build a Hacker News CLI to browse top stories from terminal". It will reply by following

  ## 🔍 Existing Solutions Found

  ### NPM Packages
  - hackernews-cli: Browse HN from terminal | 200+ stars
  - haxor-news: Full featured HN CLI in Python | 3.8K stars
  - hn-cli: Minimal HN reader | 150+ stars

  ### Open Source Tools
  - circumflex: Beautiful HN terminal client | 1K+ stars
  - clx: TUI for Hacker News | 400+ stars

  ## 📊 Build vs Buy Comparison

  | Option | Type | Cost | Setup | Maintenance | Est. Tokens |
  |--------|------|------|-------|-------------|-------------|
  | circumflex | CLI tool | Free | 1 min | None | 0 |
  | haxor-news | CLI tool | Free | 2 min | None | 0 |
  | Custom CLI | Build | Free | 2-4 hrs | You own it | ~40-80K |

  ## 💡 Recommendation

  Install circumflex or haxor-news. Both are mature, well-maintained,
  and have features you'll forget to implement:

  - Collapsible comments
  - Vim keybindings
  - Color themes
  - Story filtering
  - Offline caching

I installed circumflex in 10 seconds. It does everything I wanted plus features I didn't know I needed.
Tokens saved: ~50K. Time saved: 3 hours.

Wanna try it?

Install the skill:

# Add the marketplace
/plugin marketplace add gaupoit/programming-advisor

# Install the plugin
/plugin install programming-advisor

Or try the demo project:

git clone https://github.com/gaupoit/dont-reinvent-the-wheel-demo.git
cd dont-reinvent-the-wheel-demo
claude

Happy Coding/Vibing

Paul Ng @gaupoit

Vibe coding is great! But we don't need to build anything from scratch.

Comments 1 total