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.

My non-technical client has totally vibe coded a SaaS prototype with lots of features, way bigger product than OP and it sort of works. They spent like 200 hours on it. I wonder what would have been the time needed to clean it up and approve it is secure. I declined to work on it, as I was not sure if it's even possible or if it would be better to rewrite the entire thing from scratch with better prompts. I was not that sure about it given the cost and the fact that they had a product that sort of worked and I let them go to find someone to clean it up. My reasoning is that if the client took 200h to develop this without stopping to check the code, it would take me 2 - 3 x to rewrite it with AI, but the right way, while the cleanup may be so painful it would be way better value for money to rewrite it from scratch.

I'd also say for a lot of applications -- most applications perhaps -- outside of "consumer" ones, the number of features is quite a bit more important than the shape of a button or the animations during a page transition.

Even pretty massive companies like databricks don't think about those things and basically have a UI template library that they then compose all their interfaces from. Nothing fancy. Its all about features, and LLM create copious amounts of features.

The interesting part about vibe coding is the spectrum of experiences and attitudes. I have been playing with it for 2-3hrs a day for the last 4 months now. None of my friends who are using it are using it in the same way. Some people vibe and then refactor, some spec-everything and micro-prompt the solutions. Nobody is feeling like this thing can go unsupervised.

And then there is one guy, a friend of mine, who is planning to release a "submit a bug report, we will fix it immediately" feature (so, collect error report from a user, possibly interview them, then assess if its a bug or not with a "product owner LLM", and then autonomously do it, and if it passes the tests - merge and push to prod - all under one hour. Thats for a mid cap company, for their client-facing product. F*** hell! I have a full bag of bug reports ready for when this hits prod :->

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.

> 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.

> Now I'm pretty sure that people who say they "vibecoded an app in 30 minutes" are either building simple copies of existing projects, produce some buggy crap, or just farm engagement.

Some people seem to be better at it than others. I see a huge gulf in what people can do. Oddly there is a correlation between was a good engineer pre AI and can vibe code well.

But I see one odd thing. A subset of those who people would consider good or even amazing pre AI struggle. The best I can tell at this stage is because they lacked get int good results with unskilled workers in the past and just relied on their own skills to carry the project.

AI coders can do some amazing things. But at this stage you have to be careful about how you guide it down a path in the same way you did with junior engineers. I am not making a comparison to AI being junior, they by far can code better than most senior engineers, and have access to knowledge at lighting speed.

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.

100 hours try 500 hours at least if you want a competitive product, unless you are a wizard at marketing where you out market the 80/20 guys.