10 Practical Tips to Speed Up AI Vibe Coding with Cursor & Claude Code

I spent a month building a full-stack business app almost entirely through AI “vibe coding” — shipping features by prompting Cursor and Claude Code instead of hand-editing every line. After burning through 500 fast requests and plenty of tokens, I learned what actually moves the needle.

This guide distills ten battle-tested tips to keep your AI pair-programmer on track: design first, checkpoint with Git, write precise UI prompts, break work into small steps, and reset bloated threads. If you’re trying to ship faster with AI today — especially on React + Node — these patterns will help you avoid loops, reduce drift, and turn prompts into working features in less time.

1. Don’t Let the Agent Restart Your Dev Server: Control the Debugging Flow

Agents love to spin up duplicate dev servers or multiple instances during debugging. That leads to port conflicts, messy runtime state, and wasted resources.

What to do:

• Write a short debugging playbook (e.g., AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md) that clarifies when/who should start/stop the dev server.
• Be explicit in chat: if a dev server is already running, don’t start another; if you need a restart, stop the old instance…