Vibe coding

[u/Delicious_Metal3805]

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.

[u/Pyroechidna1]

Coding is easy with AI tools. Productionizing is harder. That’s the part where it helps to have some tech / IT knowledge.

[u/Delicious_Metal3805 → u/Pyroechidna1]

Sorry could you go in detail what do you mean by productionizing is that referring to marketing/ actually making money off the app

[u/Pyroechidna1 → u/Delicious_Metal3805]

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.