alt Hacker News100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product
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The gap is definitely real. But I think most of this thread is misdiagnosing why it exists. It's not that AI cannot produce production quality code, it's that the very mental model most people have of AI is leading them to use the wrong interaction model for closing that last 20% of complexity in production code bases.
The author accidentally proved it: the moment they stopped prompting and opened Figma to actually design what they wanted, Claude nailed the implementation. The bottleneck was NEVER the code generation, it was the thinking that had to happen BEFORE ever generating that code. It sounds like most of you offload the thinking to AFTER the complexity has arisen when the real pattern is frontloading the architectural thinking BEFORE a single line of code is generated.
Most of the 100-hour gap is architecture and design work that was always going to take time. AI is never going to eliminate that work if you want production grade software. But when harnessed correctly it can make you dramatically faster at the thinking itself, you just have to actually use it as a thinking partner and not just a code monkey.
They're... launching an NFT product in 2026...
I know it's not the point of this article, but really?
The more I evaluate Claude Code, the more it feels like the world's most inconsistent golfer. It can get within a few paces of the hole in often a single strike, and then it'll spend hours, days, weeks trying to nail the putt.
There's some 80-20:ness to all programming, but with current state of the art coding models, the distribution is the most extreme it's ever been.
I think there's a lot to pick apart here but I think the core premise is full of truth. This gap is real contrary to what you might see influencers saying and I think it comes from a lot of places but the biggest one is writing code is very different than architecting a product.
I've always said, the easiest part of building software is "making something work." The hardest part is building software that can sustain many iterations of development. This requires abstracting things out appropriately which LLMs are only moderately decent at and most vibe coders are horrible at. Great software engineers can architect a system and then prompt an LLM to build out various components of the system and create a sustainable codebase. This takes time an attention in a world of vibe coders that are less and less inclined to give their vibe coded products the attention they deserve.
"working" != "shipping."
When we start selling the software, and asking people to pay for/depend upon our product, the rules change -substantially.
Whenever we take a class, they always use carefully curated examples, to make whatever they are teaching, seem absurdly simple. That's what you are seeing, when folks demonstrate how "easy" some new tech is.
A couple of days ago, I visited a friend's office. He runs an Internet Tech company, that builds sites, does SEO, does hosting, provides miscellaneous tech services, etc.
He was going absolutely nuts with OpenClaw. He was demonstrating basically rewiring his entire company, with it. He was really excited.
On my way out, I quietly dropped by the desk of his #2; a competent, sober young lady that I respect a lot, and whispered "Make sure you back things up."
I’ve had a similar experience. I’ve been vibecoding a personal kanban app for myself. Claude practically one-shotted 90% of the core functionality (create boards, lanes, cards, etc.) in a single session. But after that I’ve now spent close to 30 hours planning and iterating on the remaining features and UI/UX tweaks to make the app actually work for me, and still, it doesn’t feel "ready" yet. That’s not to say it hasn’t sped up the process considerably; it would’ve taken me hours to achieve what Claude did in the first 10 minutes.
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.
> Late in the night most problems were fixed and I wrote a script that found everyone whose payment got stuck. I sent them money back (+ extra $1 as a ‘thank you for your patience’ note), and let them know via DMs.
(emphasis added)
Not sure if it was actually written by hand or AI was glossed over, but as soon as giving away money was on the table, the author seems to have ditched AI.
I started working on one of my apps around a year ago. There was no ai CLI back then. My first prototype was done in Gemini chat. It took a week copy and pasting text between windows. But I was obsessed.
The result worked but that's just a hacked together prototype. I showed it to a few people back then and they said I should turn it into a real app.
To turn it into a full multi user scaleable product... I'm still at it a year later. Turns out it's really hard!
I look at the comments about weekend apps. And I have some of those too, but to create a real actual valuable bug free MVP. It takes work no matter what you do.
Sure, I can build apps way faster now. I spent months learning how to use ai. I did a refactor back in may that was a disaster. The models back then were markedly worse and it rewrote my app effectively destroying it. I sat at my desk for 12 hours a day for 2 weeks trying to unpick that mess.
Since December things have definitely gotten better. I can run an agent up to 8 hours unattended, testing every little thing and produce working code quite often.
But there is still a long way to go to produce quality.
Most of the reason it's taking this long is that the agent can't solve the design and infra problems on its own. I end up going down one path, realising there is another way and backtracking. If I accepted everything the ai wanted, then finishing would be impossible.
Instead of 10x devs you now have the super rare 100x devs. They are using AI how it should be used.
If you ask for something complicated this headline is more than true. But why complicate things, keep it simple and keep it fast.
Also this article uses 'pfp' like it's a word, I can't figure out what it means.
I'm able to vibe code simple apps in 30 minutes, polish it in four hours and now I've been enjoying it for 2 months.
This seems more like he is bad at describing what he wants and is prompting for “a UI” and then iterating “no, not like that” for 99 hours.
What I really want to know is... as a software developer for 25+ years, when using these AI tools- it is still called "vibecoding"? Or is "vibecoding" reserved for people with no/little software development background that are building apps. Genuine question.
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.
It already starts with BS. Yes there are apps you can build in 30 minutes and they are great, not buggy or crap as he says it. And there are apps you need 1 hour or even weeks. It depends on what you want to build. To start off by saying that every app build in 30 minutes is crap, simply shows that he did not want to think about it, is ignorant or he simply wanted to push himselve higher up by putting others down. At this point, every programmer who claims that vibecoding doesn't make you at least 10 times more productive is simply lying or worst, doesn't know how to vibe code.
I came across the following yesterday: "The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences," a famous Zen teaching from the Hsin Hsin Ming by Sengstan
As we move from tailors to big box stores I think we have to get used to getting what we get, rather than feeling we can nitpick every single detail.
I'd also be more interested in how his 3rd, 4th or 5th vibe coded app goes.
I have not been coding for a few years now. I was wondering if vibe coding could unstick some of my ideas. Here is my question, can I use TDD to write tests to specify what I want and then get the llm to write code to pass those tests?
The speed of prototyping right now is wild.
The interesting shift seems to be that building the first version is no longer the bottleneck — distribution, UX polish and reliability are.
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 AI, it’s easier to get the first 90 percent out there. This means we can spend more time on the remaining 10 percent, which means more time for craftsmanship and figuring out how to make your users happy.
EXCEPT... you've just vibe coded the first 90 percent of the product, so completing the remaining 10 percent will take WAY longer than normal because the developers have to work with spaghetti mess.
And right there this guy has shown exactly how little people who are not software developers with experience understand about building software.
> The "remaining 10 percent" is a difference between slop and something people enjoy.
I would say the remaining 10% are about how robust your solution is - anything associated with 'vibe' feels inherently unsecure. If you can objectively proof it is not, that's 10 % time well spend.
this is why i use ai just for one file at the time, as extension of my own programming. not so fast, but keeps control
>> 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.
Look at the screenshots to understand what the author means by 'product'.
I keep seeing things that were vibe coded and thinking, "That's really impressive for something that you only spent that much time on".
To have a polished software project, you must spend time somewhat menially iterating and refining (as each type of user).
To have a polished software project, you need to have started with tests and test coverage from the start for the UI, too.
Writing tests later is not as good.
I have taken a number of projects from a sloppy vibe coded prototype to 100% test coverage. Modern coding llm agents are good at writing just enough tests for 100% coverage.
But 100% test coverage doesn't mean that it's quality software, that it's fuzzed, or that it's formally verified.
Quality software requires extensive manual testing, iteration, and revision.
I haven't even reviewed this specific project; it's possible that the author developed a quality (CLI?) UI without e2e tests in so much time?
Was the process for this more like "vibe coding" or "pair programming with an LLM"?
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 can't say I'm impressed by this at all. 100+ hours to build a shitty NFT app that takes one picture and a predefined prompt, then mints you a dinosaur NFT. This is the kind of thing I would've seen college students slam out over a weekend for a coding jam with no experience and a few cans of red bull with more quality and effort. Has our standards really gotten so low? I don't see any craftsmanship at play here.
Im an 20 year veteran of application development consulting. Contributor level... not talking head. I do more estimating than anyone you likely know. Consulting is cooked. I just AI native built (not vibe coding...) an application with a buddy, another Principal level engineer and what would cost a client 500-750k and 8-12 weeks, we did for $200 and 1 sprint. Its a passion project but highly complex mapping and navigation app with host/client multi-user sync'd state. Cooked.
If you hear someone spouting off about how vibe coding allows for creation of killer apps in a fraction of the time/cost, just ask them if you can see what successful killer apps they’ve created with it. It’s always crickets at that point because it’s somewhere between wishful thinking and an outright lie.
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.
Why did this crypto grifter AI app get traction on this site?
I mean the worst part about this is the author also vibe coded their security. It could have been much more catastrophic if they built a crypto wallet or trading system. But because it was NFTs I guess the max damage was limited.
I have to say its a little sad that so many devs think of security and cryptography in the same way as library frameworks. In that they see it as just some black box API to use for their projects rather than respecting that its a fully developed, complex field that demands expertise to avoid mistakes.
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Wow. First realistic post about coding assistants that I've read on HN, I think.
[Disclaimer: that I have read. Doesn't mean there weren't others.]
Too bad it's about NFTs but we can't have everything, can we?
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.