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vibesmith

Principled non-features

vibesmith deliberately refuses some authoring affordances that are familiar from heavyweight native engines (Unity, Godot, Unreal) and from R3F-flavoured visual editors (Triplex, Threlte Studio). They look like obvious wins; they are not, and this page names them so you know what to expect.

The reasoning is one rule: vibesmith bets that AI coding assistants are most useful on idiomatic code, so every authoring feature has to leave your code at least as legible to an AI assistant as it was before. Affordances that would require a less-legible code shape — generated decorators, shadow scene files, registry-by-name indirection — lose that test even when they would feel familiar.

The full framework-internal catalogue is in the framework repo’s principled-non-features.md (growing append-only as new affordances surface in the ecosystem). This page is the consumer-facing summary.

No JSX rewrite

Section titled “No JSX rewrite”

You won’t see this. Drag a transform gizmo, your .tsx file on disk silently updates with the new prop values. (Triplex’s and Threlte Studio’s headline feature.)

What vibesmith does instead. Edits that should persist go through recipe edits — JSON files in .vibesmith/recipes/ that the dynamic scene loader picks up at runtime. The inspector shows you the recipe diff before it lands, you commit it like any other source change. Your JSX stays exactly as you wrote it.

For edits that shouldn’t persist (transform tweaking during iteration), the framework keeps them in memory and offers a “play-mode edit” banner. Capture them to a scenario if they’re worth replaying.

No visual scripting

Section titled “No visual scripting”

You won’t see this. A node-graph editor where you wire gameplay logic without writing code. (Unreal Blueprints, Unity Bolt.)

What vibesmith does instead. Game logic is idiomatic TypeScript via defineGameScript. If you’d otherwise reach for visual scripting because writing the TypeScript feels hard, ask your AI coding assistant for the edit — that’s the affordance that replaces “designer-friendly wiring” in vibesmith’s bet. The assistant is faster than node-wiring and the output is code your next session can read.

No drag-reference-onto-field

Section titled “No drag-reference-onto-field”

You won’t see this. Drag a GameObject from the hierarchy onto a Transform target field in another component to assign a serialised reference. (Unity’s headline ergonomic.)

What vibesmith does instead. References are hand-typed string names in source code — e.g. ctx.find('Player.Camera'). To make this comfortable:

  • The vibesmith MCP surface gives your AI assistant cmd+P-style autocomplete over scene-object names.
  • The hierarchy and scene-inspector panels double-click a node to insert its name at the cursor.
  • Lint warnings fire when a name resolves to nothing in the active scene.

The string is in the source either way; your assistant resolves it the same way the runtime does.

No shadow scene file

Section titled “No shadow scene file”

You won’t see this. A scene.json (or .bsn, or .unity) sits alongside your JSX and is the authoritative description the framework reads at runtime, with your JSX as a derived view.

What vibesmith does instead. JSX + recipe JSON are the only sources of truth. JSX describes hand-authored scene content; recipe JSON describes procedural / parametric content the dynamic loader resolves. There is no third file, and nothing in the framework rewrites either one based on a visual edit.

No name-registry indirection in your code

Section titled “No name-registry indirection in your code”

You won’t see this. Framework primitives like <Prefab id="crate" mass={10}/> where "crate" resolves to a prefab definition in some other file you have to crawl to know what <Prefab id="crate"/> actually contains.

What vibesmith does instead. Prefabs are typed-data factories. You import the prefab factory, call it with parameters, render the returned JSX inline:

import { crate } from './prefabs/crate';


function MyScene() {
  return (
    <>
      {crate({ mass: 10, material: 'wood' })}
      {crate({ mass: 5, material: 'metal' })}
    </>
  );
}

Your AI assistant reads the factory’s parameters and its render body in the file; no registry crawl, no string-name resolution. The inspectable-parameters cookbook recipe walks through the same pattern for game scripts.

How this list grows

Section titled “How this list grows”

vibesmith periodically surveys what authoring features Unity / Godot / Bevy / R3F editors are shipping and classifies each against the AI-fluency test. Closures that pay for themselves become roadmap items; closures that would tax AI fluency get added to the framework’s principled-non-features catalogue. The list never shrinks opportunistically — closures require fresh evidence that the original prediction was wrong.

Cross-references

Section titled “Cross-references”