Vibe Coding Meets Project Management

LLMs generate code quickly, but other traditions (sprint planning, code quality, review, and QA) struggle to keep pace, so shipping stalls. A broader diffusion of LLMs throughout the SDLC may elevate velocity across the board while mitigating novel risks. Here’s how Taskmaster helped us on that journey

There’s so much more to the SDLC (Software Development Lifecycle) than “vibe coding”. While LLMs can generate code tokens super quickly, bottlenecks emerge: if we’re shipping code more quickly, does planning and roadmap need to speed up? And after we’ve written a ton of code with LLMs, how do we maintain code quality and confidence to ship through the release cycle? The good news is that today’s LLMs appear capable of helping with those bottlenecks if we just build the harnesses for it.

We tried out Taskmaster this week with Claude Code to bring task definition and organization to vibe coding.

Taskmaster parses your product requirements into tasks that are pretty well tuned to what Claude 3.7 Sonnet can code end to end while under human supervision.

Using taskmaster felt easier - it made task organization more consistent and higher quality without requiring as much prompt engineering expertise to achieve the same with manual prompting patterns.

It feels useful for significant features that are too much to give to Claude Code in one go, and where you already have a clear product objective and technical design laid out in a PRD so there’s minimal mystery in what the LLM needs to build.

It’s nice to see features like handling implementation drift - that was a key thing I needed to solve when I was building my own custom “knowledge agents” 6 months ago. Since pre-planned tasks never stay perfectly aligned with where the implementation leads, you need robust handling to keep tasks on track and not to confuse future LLM sessions.

My approach was automated replanning - depending on the LLM to automatically reason about and improve task definitions after each step was completed. We’ll need super reliable tooling for this in order to reliably delegate larger projects to LLMs with less supervision overhead.

Check out Taskmaster: https://github.com/eyaltoledano/claude-task-master