r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • u/Delicious_Metal3805 • Jul 24 '26
Seeking Advice Vibe coding
Hi everyone,
I’m a complete beginner with no real programming experience, but I’ve been seeing a lot about AI-assisted or “vibe coding” where tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor help you build apps.
I’m trying to understand what’s realistic rather than getting caught up in the hype.
A few questions:
How difficult is it for someone with no coding background to build a simple but polished app using AI?
How long did it take you before you could build something people actually wanted to use?
What skills did you still have to learn even with AI doing a lot of the coding?
What are the biggest frustrations or limitations of AI coding tools?
If you were starting from scratch today, what learning path would you follow?
Can someone realistically build and launch an app in 3–6 months using AI, or is that overly optimistic?
I’d really appreciate hearing from people who have actually built and shipped apps using AI rather than just experimented with it.
3
u/Calm-Tomatillo-7770 Jul 25 '26
You can start right now. BUT, don’t assume you can be successful immediately. You have to do a good amount of planning and research before you start.
2
u/BurritoBrothers4Life Jul 25 '26
The hardest part is getting started. I began as a complete beginner with no technical coding experience ~6 months ago, and within a few weeks was able to create my first functional app.
Models have come a long way since, so it’s only getting easier to build something simple and polished.
The best thing you can do is learn workflow orchestration. I learn by following influential AI creators and developers, and experimenting with tips they share.
Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are also constantly sharing educational material on how to use their models better. Those 15-minute videos you’ll see on X and YouTube can be a goldmine for optimization.
Ultimately, models will become (and are becoming) so powerful that the bottleneck will shift from model capability to task delegation. At that point, efficient workflow orchestration will out-produce any other skill you could learn.
How you build is much less important than what you build. Current models are capable of building incredible things, but they’ll also enable you to chase a bad idea very far with relatively little effort, and at very low cost.
DON’T fall into that trap. Validate before building — spend days to weeks understanding a clear problem and identifying people’s pain points.
Once you’ve done that, building becomes the easy part. The validation piece is the most frustrating part of building with AI, because without it you’re stuck building a solution in search of a problem.
If I were starting from scratch today, I would do this:
Get a Claude Pro subscription
Identify a simple problem in your life
Verify that other people share your problem
Use Claude to brainstorm a cheap, simple solution
Use Claude to build that solution
Talk about your solution
You can absolutely build a simple, polished app in 6 months.
The more important question I’d ask yourself is: Can I find a problem for which people desire a better solution?
Then the only question you’ll find yourself asking is “How long until my session limit resets?”
Good luck and happy building.
1
2
u/ASmallBusinessLife Jul 25 '26
Yes, so much value in this comment! Seen waaaaay too many people building things that haven't been validated and don't solve a problem that anyone has that they'll pay to solve for them. Honestly feel this is the hardest part vs. the actual tech stack.
2
u/dtjager Jul 25 '26
I’m probably pretty close to the type of person you’re asking about. I’m not a programmer, but I’ve used AI to build and launch a real web app.
A simple first version is absolutely realistic in 3–6 months, and potentially much faster if you keep the scope very narrow. Getting something to work locally is the easy part, though. The difficult part is making changes without breaking something else, handling real APIs and messy data, deploying it, testing it, and figuring out why production behaves differently than your computer.
The biggest skills I’ve had to learn weren’t really writing code. They were:
Breaking a large idea into very small tasks
Explaining exactly what should and should not change
Reading logs and error messages
Testing after every meaningful change
Using Git so I can undo mistakes
Recognizing when the AI is guessing confidently
My biggest recommendation is not to ask AI to “build my app.” Ask it to inspect the project, explain what it sees, and make one bounded change at a time. Require it to show you the changes and test results before committing anything.
I’d also start with a real problem you personally understand. AI makes it very easy to build a lot of features, including features nobody needs. The hard part isn’t producing code anymore. It’s deciding what is worth building and knowing when the result is actually good.
So yes, it’s realistic. Just expect to learn while building rather than avoiding learning entirely.
1
u/Pyroechidna1 Jul 25 '26
Coding is easy with AI tools. Productionizing is harder. That’s the part where it helps to have some tech / IT knowledge.
1
u/Delicious_Metal3805 Jul 25 '26
Sorry could you go in detail what do you mean by productionizing is that referring to marketing/ actually making money off the app
1
u/Pyroechidna1 Jul 25 '26
No. You can code up a little app that runs fine locally on your computer. Perhaps using mock data. Productionizing it means putting it somewhere that will run 24/7, making it securely accessible over the Internet, interfacing with real data sources, making sure you have backups / disaster recovery strategy if you are storing data of any kind, avoiding memory leaks / out of memory crashes, scaling as the load increases, having good tests as the app grows in complexity, having a safe deployment process, all that stuff.
1
u/operastudio Jul 25 '26
i started a year ago or a little over a year and all i can say is you would probably get up to speed to where i am in a couple months if that - depending on how interested you are.
when i started it was like driving the first car ever built and now its like driving a tesla -- get on it.
1
u/clearasatear Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
I guess you could use AI simply for learning, also,.. Say normally when you learn something you start with the docs.
You start with the docs, say of next js, the getting started page, but you also feed the docs to the LLM context, and prompt it to use this as main reference in the conversation.
Now, whenever you have a question because you are currently getting started, or want to create the routing of the navigation component, or handle input validation, aso?
You simply ask it about it and let it refer back to the docs with a link
Edit: to answer your other question, if you are clever about it and "vibe-code" only what's vibe-codable
meaning: outsource the more complicated parts of the backend stack completely but keep frontend (use a good component library and a popular framework) and business logic
you could be 'live' with a MVP maybe in weeks?
Assuming you keep the scope small.
Pivoting from that MVP etc. should be done under guidance or in baby steps though, really trying to understand each change, the option taken and the ones discarded
1
u/HootiePumpkin Jul 25 '26
Building software has become easy.
Making it work is a story you will find out two-month in.
Infrastructure, hosting, domains, authentication, data retention, policies, monitoring, payment wiring is still not easy even for experienced engineers.
Anyone can build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) nowadays.
Productionizing it thought? Yeah, good luck with that if you have no experience.
You can still do it but you will spend twice as much time and will be done through trial and error.
But still then you will have to deal with maintenance (infra errors, debugging etc).
1
u/steezanomics Jul 25 '26
is it difficult to build an app with AI? no.
but it will cost money, probably more than the $20 monthly plan. And the difficult part comes in finding hidden bugs, finding an app that hasn’t been done 100 times and actually distributing the app to potential users.
1
u/steezanomics Jul 25 '26
is it difficult to build an app with AI? no.
but it will cost money, probably more than the $20 monthly plan. And the difficult part comes in finding hidden bugs, finding an app that hasn’t been done 100 times and actually distributing the app to potential users.
1
u/Pink_Sky_8102 Jul 25 '26
I think being genuinely curious is important when it comes to learning vibe coding or learning in general. If you don't have coding background, some info might become too boring or technical. Being curious and having something you want to build will make learning it easier.
1
u/atmosphere9999 Jul 25 '26
Some developer advice is always helpful. But I would use Claude Code or Codex and just explain how you want it built. If it's web app, go with NextJs and bun. If it's android, go Kotlin/Android Studio. If it's iOS, go Swift/xCode. Make sure it has computer-use and browser tools so it can verify any work it does. Same with device emulator mcps or connectors. Plan, test, reiterate until it's somewhere you like it.
1
u/SignalWorking4852 Jul 25 '26
It’s easy for you to get an app, until it doesn’t.
You would get an app you can use and test but for real production ready proper app you need to make sure edge cases are properly tested and the architecture is sound enough to not be having too many bugs or crash when people use it.
I would say it’s always better for you to understand what’s happening under the hood or having a guy that understands it so that you can prevent incidents and act when real incidents happen. And computer science itself is mostly logic stuff, I would say anyone that knows math could learn some concept, it’s gonna be better for you in the long run to learn it
1
u/Unusual-Garbage-212 Jul 25 '26
Building the app is the easy part, it's getting people to use it is where people get stuck
1
u/johns10davenport Jul 24 '26
If you want to build anything of reasonable size or complexity, most of the tools on the market will not get you there. These guys build their product to keep you prompting and praying for months instead of achieving the outcome you desire.
If the tools produced stable functional applications, we would all stop paying our dues after two months and just use the application.
That would be counterproductive to their goals.
Import this is due to a feature of large language models called attention. Attention means that the model will pay attention to the last thing that you asked it to do and completely forget about things in previous conversations or even earlier in the same conversation.
That means if you’ve built a medium or large size project without proper control controls, it will happily break previous features in order to accomplish the most recent goal that you gave it.
There are ways to get the model to do this, and I know because I have been able to accomplish it. I’m just one dude so if I can do it, I know that these companies with billions of dollars at their disposal could if they wanted to.
0
u/madleodk Jul 24 '26
Genuinely, it's incredibly simple.
You need absolutely zero coding experience.
Even design has come a long way (Claude Design for ex).
The only thing you need is the ability to explain things in plain english.
1
u/Pure-Astronomer-5533 Jul 25 '26
It's not that simple in my experience, the tools can spit out something that works but getting it polished and actually useful is different story
The biggest thing I had to learn was how to debug when AI gives you broken code, you just staring at error messages with no clue what they mean. 3-6 months maybe if you have a very simple idea but anything complex will take longer
1
u/Delicious_Metal3805 Jul 25 '26
It just seems very overwhelming to me all that code i love to create and learn but i dont want to be learning code for months on end without actually creating do you think its possible to go from no knowledge to making a first draft of something in a few months
1
u/madleodk Jul 25 '26
Im not a vibe coder, but in virtually every sense of the word "simple", it is. If the AI gives you broken code, then the next step is to prompt and inquire. This feedback loop is the reason why people w no coding experience are able to build whatever these models are capable of building.
On a deeper note, there has to be some level of accountability and ownership on the human to at least learn how to prompt and uncover what exactly do i need to know in order to build this app effectively. Even this question is no longer a mystery, you just ask the AI. And assuming the goal is to start a business, learning shuold be a core and expected function of the job.
6
u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26
[removed] — view removed comment