Beyond Vibes: Engineering Practical LLM Tools

This sprint reveals the gap between impressive AI demos and genuinely useful tools. By constraining scope, encoding team-specific conventions, and building proper infrastructure (NestJS, Redis, SQLite, Claude Haiku), the author created something teams will actually adopt—not a general-purpose assistant, but a focused tool that saves senior developers' time on code reviews. It's a case study in LLM engineering as infrastructure work: unglamorous, process-heavy, and far more valuable than another 'vibes-based' AI product.