>> people who say they "vibecoded an app in 30 minutes" are either building simple copies of existing projects,

those are not copies, they aren't even features. usually part of a tiny feature that barely works only in demo.

with all vibe coding in the world today you still need at least 6 months full time to build a nice note taking app.

If we are talking something more difficult - it will be years - or you will need a team and it will still take a long time.

Everything less will result in an unusable product that works only for demo and has 80% churn.

The 80/20 rule doesn’t go away. I am an AI true believer and I appreciate how fast we can get from nothing to 80% but the last “20%” still takes 80%+ of the time.

The old rules still apply mainly.

With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes.

I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself only.

Of course vibe coding is going to be a headache if you have very particular aesthetic constraints around both the code and UX, and you aren't capable of clearly and explicitly explaining those constraints (which is often hard to do for aesthetics).

There are some good points here to improve harnesses around development and deployment though, like a deployment agent should ask if there is an existing S3 bucket instead of assuming it has to set everything up. Deployment these days is unnecessarily complicated in general, IMO.

Woodworking is an analogy that I like to use in deciding how to apply coding agents. The finished product needs to be built by me, but now I can make more, and more sophisticated, jigs with the coding agents, and that in turn lets me improve both quality and quantity.

I work as a DevOps/SRE and have been doing it FinTech (bank, hedge funds, startups) and Crypto (L1 chain) for almost 20 years.

My thoughts on vibe coding vs production code:

- vibe coding can 100% get you to a PoC/MVP probably 10x faster than pre LLMs

- This is partly b/c it is good at things I'm not good at (e.g. front end design)

- But then I need to go in and double check performance, correctness, information flow, security etc

- The LLM makes this easier but the improvement drops to about 2-3x b/c there is a lot of back and forth + me reading the code to confirm etc (yes, another LLM could do some of this but then that needs to get setup correctly etc)

- The back and forth part can be faster if e.g. you have scripts/programs that deterministically check outputs

- Testing workloads that take hours to run still take hours to run with either a human or LLM testing them out (aka that is still the bottleneck)

So overall, this is why I think we're getting wildly different reports on how effective vibe coding is. If you've never built a data pipeline and a LLM can spin one up in a few minutes, you think it's magic. But if you've spent years debugging complicated trading or compliance data pipelines you realize that the LLM is saving you some time but not 10x time.

Look at the screenshots to understand what the author means by 'product'.

I have had the experience with creating https://swiftbook.dev/learn

Used Codex for the whole project. At first I used claude for the architect of the backend since thats where I usually work and got experience in. The code runner and API endpoints were easy to create for the first prototype. But then it got to the UI and here's where sh1t got real. The first UI was in react though I had specifically told it to use Vue. The code editor and output window were a mess in terms of height, there was too much space between the editor and the output window and no matter how much time I spent prompting it and explaining to it, it just never got it right. Got tired and opened figma, used it to refine it to what I wanted. Shared the code it generated to github, cloned the code locally then told codex to copy the design and finally it got it right.

Then came the hosting where I wanted the code runner endpoint to be in a docker container for security purpose since someone could execute malicious code that took over the server if I just hosted it without some protection and here it kept selecting out of date docker images. Had to manually guide it again on what I needed. Finally deployed and got it working especially with a domain name. Shared it with a few friends and they suggested some UI fixes which took some time.

For the runner security hardening I used Deepseek and claude to generate a list of code that I could run to show potential issues and despite codex showing all was fine, was able to uncover a number of issues then here is where it got weird, it started arguing with me despite showing all the issues present. So I compiled all the issues in one document, shared the dockerfile and linux secomp config tile with claude and the also issues document. It gave me a list of fixes for the docker file to help with security hardening which I shared back with codex and that's when it fixed them.

Currently most of the issues were resolved but the whole process took me a whole week and I am still not yet done, was working most evenings. So I agree that you cannot create a usable product used by lots of users in 30 minutes not unless it's some static website. It's too much work of constant testing and iteration.