Thus far, and granted I don't have as much experience as others, I just demand that AI simplify the code until I understand everything that it is doing. If I see it doing something in a convoluted way, I demand that it does it in the obvious way. If it's adding too many dependencies, I tell it to remove the goofy ones and write it the long way with the less capable stdlib function or helped by something that I already have a dependency on.

It's writing something for me, not for itself.

Yeah, as much as I don’t like to use AI to write large portions of code, I’m using it to help me learn web development and it can feel like a following a tutorial, but tailored to the exact project I want.

My current approach is creating something like a Gem on Gemini with custom instructions and the updated source code of the project as context.

I just discuss what I want, and it gives me the code to do it, then I write by hand, ask for clarifications and suggest changes until I feel like the current approach is actually a good one. So not really “vibe-coding”, though I guess a large number of software developers who care about keeping the project sane must be doing this.