The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

risyachka

>> 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.

nemo44x

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.

niemandhier

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.

naasking

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.

jonstewart

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.

alexpotato

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.

esafak

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

dielll

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.

fzeroracer

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.

skyberrys

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.

rhoopr

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.

IAmGraydon

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.

stillpointlab

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.

jimnotgym

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?

anonymous344

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

carterparks

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.

raincole

They're... launching an NFT product in 2026... I know it's not the point of this article, but really?

westurner

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"?

nottorp

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?

hebrides

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.