There were stories of people validating their idea using 'no code' i.e. building a very crude version of their startup quickly, and deeming 'no code' very useful because the benefits of fast idea validation outweighed the downsides of 'no code' (e.g. inextensible design, UX deficiencies, 'toy app' feel etc).
Fast forward to today, there's a lot of hype around 'vibe coding', which can make existing devs more efficient. But have there been any cases of someone who couldn't previously code being able to make a successful start up by way of 'vibe coding', if so, who/what?
Once your codebase reaches the size needed to solve actual business problems, the quality of the output varies wildly, the complexity of the prompts required to produce useful code increases, and the output code requires significant editing to actually integrate without bugs or errors.
My personal opinion is that for vibe coding to be viable as the complexity of feature requirements or the size of the code base increase, the specificity and complexity of the input prompt will eventually demand more from the engineer than just writing the code, since code is more specific by definition than natural language.
Or define what a true microservice is because I think there are many takes on that.
Mind you, we're talking zero review at all, just using whatever the LLM produces.
Now suddenly the problem is that AI can't write a lot of code.
Now suddenly the problem is that AI can't write a lot of code.
The problem is that AI can't currently write large quantities of correct and maintainable code to create a larger app.
(For some value of "larger")
LLMs have an unsolvable problem of "hallucination". It is a bad description of what the problem is because hallucination is all they do, it just also happens to be correct in many cases. The larger the codebase or the problem space, the less accurate LLMs tend to be.
And developers to a lot more than generating LOC.
I basically use LLMs to plan work, then to do the backend work with close supervision, then I do all the UX stuff completely on my own.
I've been using VSCode's Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4 and find it to be terrifyingly competent running 8 hours a day costing ~$10.
I am developing techniques to keep it moving forward producing code and fast. First, prompt engineering like "write clean, simple, and elegant code." Second, I use TypeScript very strictly which helps. Third, the models are amazing at producing very simple test units which will be important in the fifth. Fourth, I use techniques like "look for opportunities to refactor pure functions in the file and put them at the top of file" or "look for opportunities to refactor pure function and put them in shared utils.ts file." Fifth, every hour or so, I will have the agent simplify and clean the code and with complete test coverage both unit and integration as longs as they all pass .... good to go.
This is a process and it is the same every time. So now I'm thinking about how do I write code to automate these steps into an automated process. For example, I keep using the same pattern of steps to solve hard debugging problems which I'm going to leave out of this conversation now. If I can create a process in code, I'd be one step closer to complete automation coding.
The patterns are emerging. I strongly believe in 12 months these systems are going to be able to write extremely complicated programs with very little input from the human in the loop.
You can see each prompt and each commit that was generated here: https://github.com/sutt/agro/blob/master/docs/dev-summary-v1...
Since AI-Gen code is such a roll of the dice, the key is to roll the dice a lot - usually generate at least 3 potential solutions from at least two separate providers at the outset - and get good at quickly reviewing the offered solutions, or iterating on the prompt and regenerating.
I very heavily use the VSCode Copilot coding agents for all this.
These are not trivial problems.
Maybe I should revisit Claud Code with this systematic process workflow that has been evolving.
I've also seen incidents of those apps turning out to have security holes you can drive a truck through, and hiring professional help to move beyond their origins.
(I didn't keep notes of the companies and I don't want to specifically call any out, but they exist.)
I'm hoping this is a relatively short-lived trend. I think vibe coding tools for personal use and prototypes is to be celebrated, but vibe coding software that other people will depend on or even pay for is deeply irresponsible.
And they usually try to sell you their courses/mentorships.
I don't know if I'm being suspicious because they seem fake or because they came out of nowhere and are earning in a month what I make in a year.
Just like you said, they all claim to make $xk per month and have a course to sign up for. I really hate this as places like product hunt are just gummed up now with Slapps (AI slop apps). The courses they sell seem to be how to quickly make Slapps, get people's email addresses and then use the authors email list management software (for a monthly fee) to endlessly send spam.
I agree with all that you said, however…
I have found that doing stuff that could be done with code with the automation tools/services that you mentioned above (plus excel) is often preferable for small businesses and certain orgs precisely so that a programmer doesn’t have to be called on every time a change is needed.
Not knocking programmers (I’ve been programming since age 10), but programmers aren’t always easy to hire and evaluate, and their cost (at least until recently) has been extremely high.
These automation tools allow for business to make a tech leap with much lower execution cost and risk.
So while I agree that a lot of the “vibe coding” stuff being promoted is drivel, that doesn’t mean that the tools themselves are not empowering in the right hands.
Step 1: Vibecode 5 trash generic apps (eg AI interior designers, gpt wrappers)
Step 2: Launch with paying 15k in google/meta ads
Step 3: Receive back ~5k in revenue
Step 4: Spam on twitter+linkedin clickbaity "heres how i reached 60K ARR in 3 milliseconds" posts to attract ex-crypto bros and hustlers
Step 5: Use your newfound following for sponsored content, courses and hopefully actual organic growth for your aforementioned trash apps
More generally, I think vibe coding has replaced lots of mockups and demos for startups. There is really zero excuse to show slides or figma now in am early product demo. There are definitely startups succeeding on this basis, as in getting funding and signing up customers.
If success means being profitable and running stable software, I don't see vibe coding as currently able to carry a company all the way through, but it's definitely part of the journey now.
I want to find the time to fine-tune GPT-4o using before/after examples of code that fails the gates and then passes them. The hope being it generates gate-compliant code on the first try much more often, which is cheaper and more reliable than relying on a base model with brute-force retries. I think this might also align with research showing that grounding models in execution feedback yields order-of-magnitude gains in sample efficiency and improved code quality, not just speed [0][1].
References
Here is one attempt at defining a TESTING.md that I pass to Claude Code [0].
Honestly, it is different from what I now use in other projects. For example, I have found that mutation tests are rarely worth the added complexity. I have not yet found a good way to enforce a deterministic gate that only permits “good” tests, so I settle on defining expectations in a markdown file that I pass to whichever coding agent I am using.
[0] https://github.com/Airbolt-AI/airbolt/blob/main/TESTING.md
Note there's a small core set of features and then relentless refining going into the product after that. I think products that require the opposite, a relentless expansion of features vs tightening bolts may be much more doomed.
If it's a non-programmer trying to build a non-trivial software product with AI I haven't heard of anyone successfully doing that and I'm very confident in saying theres no chance it'll happen with todays AI
I've made a couple of things lately that I sometimes tell people are "vibe coded" because they were heavily facilitated by LLMs, but it's not really true in the pure, literal sense.
> Claude: Sure! (proceeds to instantly vomit out a react crud app where none of the buttons do anything)
This is the same brand of person that was excited to get rich off NFTs and has now just moved on to slapps (AI slop apps).
Vibe coding is fun and great for personal projects or bootstrapping, but the specificity of the prompts needed to effect the change you want grows exponentially with the code base size to the point where you do just need to code it yourself and use the AI as a helper.
The “toy app” feel is really not a big problem if you put some effort into it. It’s very easy to see landing pages made with a one-shot request on Cursor, but if you put some effort into adjusting things, you can get to pretty good design in a fraction of the time.
To be clear, my position is “vibe coding” _must_ include _some_ level of coding by hand (not entirely prompting an AI), at least with the current generation of tools.
Another tidbit, in my personal experience, is that lovable & co are enabling completely non-technical people to push out hot sites, marketing material, etc (including simple interactive experiences, for instance) quite flawlessly and quickly. This would require a dedicated engineer at least, in the past. It’s what the “no code” promise of years past was supposed to enable (IMO it didn’t, webflow/etc are clunky and hard to use even for non-coders).