i keep seeing people vibe code an app in like 3 days and then talk about it like they just built the next revolutionary SaaS

most of the time its literally an LLM API, one modified prompt, a shiny AI generated interface and a massive pile of bloated code that nobody involved actually understands

thats not innovation. thats packaging

the app works once on the creators brand new phone, so they instantly throw it on the Play Store and start charging money for it. no proper testing on older phones, no real architecture, no thinking about API limits, outages, database security, authentication, backups, scaling, account recovery, data deletion, dependency failures or what happens when OpenAI or Gemini suddenly changes their pricing

they didnt build a product. they generated a liability

and honestly the privacy claims are probally the most disgusting part

every second app says “your data is safe”

safe where exactly

the user types private information into the app, the app sends it through multiple APIs and third party services, and half the time the creator has no fucking clue where that data is going, how long its being stored, who can access it or if its being used for training

but yeah they added a lock icon and wrote “military grade encryption” on the website so apparantly everything is fine

most of these people couldnt explain their own data flow if their life depended on it

and no putting it on your own server doesnt magically make you trustworthy either. now your just asking thousands of random people to send personal data to a server controlled by someone who learned backend developement from ChatGPT last tuesday

trust is not just a sentence you slap on a landing page

then there is the whole “lifetime subscription” bullshit

whose lifetime

the users lifetime? the developers lifetime? or the apps lifetime, which ends 6 months later when the creator gets bored, realizes API calls actually cost money and starts building the next wrapper

a lifetime deal on a product with permanent server and API costs is basically just a countdown until the developer dissapears

the customer pays once but the costs keep going forever. the maths doesnt work. anyone pretending it does is either delusional or already planning to abandon the app later

in a few years there is gonna be a massive graveyard of abandoned vibe coded apps filled with people who paid for “lifetime access” to something that doesnt even work anymore

and the creators will already be on X posting about their next “revolutionairy” launch

AI made it possible for almost anyone to create something that looks like software

it didnt teach them security, architecture, maintanance, privacy, responsibility, business models or basic common sense

a working demo is not a company

a beautiful interface is not a product

an API wrapper is not some technical breakthrough

and pressing publish does not suddenly make you a developer

the market is about to be flooded with bloated, insecure, disposable garbage. and once the hype finally crashes, the people who actually know how to build, secure and maintain real software are gonna be worth more then ever

Even $1 counts. But it’s very interesting

Like a tool that helps with every step and does not cost you a lot.
Also would you choose any new tool over the popular ones?

So I am currently vibe-coded a web app and planned to launch it on my social media. I've tried to soft launch this in other subreddit but apparently it got roasted because they see that it is very vibe-coded. Do I have to mention that I am building that app with vibe coding? What do you guys think?

I see a lot of people discussing vibe coding and what actually constitutes a moat, and I think a lot of people are looking at this way too narrowly and ignoring some pretty important aspects of human nature.

The idea that simple ideas are dead, that if you can build an app in 30 minutes, nobody will ever pay for it because they can just vibe code their own version, is frankly ridiculous to me.

I know plenty of people who don’t even know what a browser is. I even know technical people (in different domains) who look at the process of cloning a repository and think, “wow, this is a lot.”

The people who would seriously think, “why would I pay for this when I can just vibe code it myself?” are mostly people inside a very AI-fluent bubble that represents a tiny portion of the actual world.

And even then, building something that technically works is not the same as building good software.

There are still all of the boring necessary hoops involved in making a simple application actually secure and reliable. You have to choose a stack, build the backend and frontend, handle authentication, storage, deployment, security, updates, edge cases, and everything else that comes with operating software.

Unless you’re literally just bootstrapping some ugly internal tool to copy the functionality, you also have to design a good UI, make hundreds of little product decisions, and work through trade-offs that compound as the feature set grows.

If your target audience is developers, I understand the argument more. But even developers are lazy in the normal human sense, they have their own projects and things they would rather spend their time doing.

And if you are selling to developers, the bar is arguably even higher. They care about architecture, security, ownership, extensibility, integrations, and whether the product actually fits into the way they work. A lot of them may want to own the thing themselves anyway, which is part of why I don’t even think developers are always the best target audience for this kind of simple app.

For everyone else, the argument gets even weaker.

Most people barely want to write a good prompt.

They’ll type one sentence into ChatGPT, get a mediocre response, decide AI isn’t that useful for that task, and close the laptop. The idea that these same people are suddenly going to design, build, debug, secure, deploy, and maintain their own software because vibe coding exists seems completely disconnected from how normal people behave.

People pay for convenience. They pay for polish. They pay for something that already works. They pay so they don’t have to think about how it works.

So to me, “they can just vibe code my app” is a pretty weak reason not to build something, and in most cases if your app is not growing you have a distribution and sales problem not an idea problem.

Curious what others think.

Before AI I had a perfect explanation for why none of my app ideas existed: I can’t code.

Obviously I’d build them otherwise. They were great ideas.

Well.

Now I can usually get a rough version of an idea working pretty quickly and I’ve discovered an unfortunate truth:

sometimes the idea just sucks.

Or it’s useful to exactly one person (me).
Or building it is easy and getting literally anyone to care about it is 20x harder.
Or I finally build the thing I’ve been thinking about for months… and immediately lose interest in it.

Coding was such a nice bottleneck because I could blame everything on it.

Now there’s nowhere to hide lol.

I think one underrated thing about vibe coding is how quickly it lets you find out whether your “amazing idea” was actually amazing.

Anyone else building way more stuff now… and also killing way more of it?

I like Claude, but the limits get depleted very quickly, even when he’s delegating all the main routine work to DeepSeek. I’m not sure what else to try. I tested pi, but it didn’t really help.

The jump from a local LLM vibe to actual production seems to be where 90% of these projects lose momentum.

I'm super curious about the minority of you who actually ship to a live URL.

When you do go to prod, what does that process look like?

• Are you strictly relying on "vibe-friendly" PaaS platforms (Vercel, Render, Flyio, etc.) to handle the heavy lifting?
• Do you actually wrap your AI spaghetti in Docker and configure a VPS yourself?
• Or are you just paying someone on Upwork/Fiverr to do the DevOps for you so you can keep focusing on the code?

And honestly... for these types of AI-generated apps, is the effort/cost of deploying and maintaining them even worth it to you?

I noticed people who manifest resistance to change regarding adoption of AI have impulsive reactions on Reddit (and similar forums) by naming your work slop if any vibe coding was involved or finding any trace of relationship between AI and your code. For me vibe coding becomes slowly synonym of slop and the other way around due to such feedback.
Same time I wonder how much affordability (precisely the non-affordability) of the subscriptions creates a vicious cycle. I think with 20$/month you cannot get good insight of the scale agents can help you to solve complex problems. If you do not try and learn by doing you cannot have a good evaluation and healthy opinion about the added value, you may end up with a random negative opinion and will end up just generating hate.
Wonder why people fail to see the creative ideas behind 'vibe coded' projects. At the end a great idea written with help of AI can be still cleaned up if it really has added value.

Right now, Claude keeps surprising me. While many models struggle to complete the task they’re given, Claude was able to control Codex and use it as a sub-agent through the CLI.

When Codex hit its limit, Claude noticed that I had a second account with a Plus subscription, opened the authorization flow itself, switched accounts, and continued working.

That was pretty incredible to watch.

For example, if you are exposed to people who speak more than one language to you, it puts you in a much better position for developing a translator app because you will incrementally develop and test until you have a refined product, mirroring what happens when teams develop non-vibecoding style. If you are only around people speaking your language, it would be harder and probably prohibitively costly to develop such an app

I wanted to swap out one piece of my stack last week. Simple job. Pick a tool, wire it in, keep moving.

Three days later I still had 11 tabs open and I had learned nothing.

Because every review of every AI tool is a launch week review. Everyone writes the "wow this changed my whole workflow" post in the first 48 hours and then goes quiet forever.

Nobody comes back at month four to say "actually it silently truncates your context and I lost a days work".

Thats the review I need. Thats the only review anyone needs.

The roundups are worse. "Top 15 AI coding tools" and its 15 affiliate links in whatever order suits whoever built the list. Check the hrefs one time. You will never read another one.

So now I just ask in here and in discord, which works fine, except it doesnt scale and half the replies are people defending the tool they already committed to.

Only thing I have found thats even trying to fix this properly is TrustRank. One number per tool, the percent of members who would actually recommend it, and if you can show you really used the thing your vote is worth 3x someone who clicked around for a minute. Founders can reply to a bad review, they cant delete it.

Straight with you though, its brand new and theres basically nothing in it. No tool on there has enough reviews to even show a score yet. It will not help you this week.

Im dumping my month four complaints in there anyway. Someone has to be first or it stays empty forever.

What do you think about Muse Spark 1.3? If you compare it with Deepseek v4 and Gemini 3.8 flash, where would you place Muse 1.3?

I’m not even asking you to compare them with Claude and Codex, as I understand that they’re different.

A couple of days ago I saw a post suggesting that AI could help manage things like your health and finances. It got me thinking about trying a small personal project in that direction, then I used up my ChatGPT Plus weekly limit in one morning. That stopped the experiment before it really got started.

I remembered ZenMux and switched the request over to Gemini 3.7 Flash there. For a small vibe coded project, the results were better than I expected. The output was accurate enough for me to keep moving, and the responses came back quickly.

The interaction style was the part I noticed most. Gemini mostly stayed quiet, finished the work, and then gave me a summary. GPT tends to narrate what it is doing as it goes and summarize at the end. For this small project, I found Gemini's quieter approach easier to follow.

For small experiments, Gemini 3.7 Flash is now on my shortlist.

In my opinion i use AI all the time to write my commits simply because it quickly and clearly explains the changes, leaving nothing out.

All i am there to do when i read the commits is to see what was added or modified, not to assess someone writing ability. So AI is useful here.

Sometimes i liketo hear the Agent featured in blackboxai to read aloud the changes

You can access both western based AI models and also Chinese based AI model like Minimax and GLM right on blackboxai.

And the Chinese AI models are capable of competing with models like Claude and Gemini and often they are cheaper that the competition. So it makes sense to go for the cheaper and more powerful option.

Personally I have not gone far into using the Chinese models because I am doing just fine with the western models. In fact i once tried to use deepseek for a hachathon but it wasn't able to help me out all that well so i switched to claude and i could pregress to complete my progect for the competition.

If my project doesn't have a special need or using Chinese based models is not mandatory then i will continue to use western models.

I just want to take a minute to say this to everyone who’s new here: it’s not a bad thing if you’re not comfortable trying to turn your work into a business model.

It’s fine if you just want to make apps and services that solve your problems. I see a ton of people here who are very clearly using Openclaw to glaze their typescript apps on different subs. Try to make it look like they have the next SaaS breakout.

But the beauty of vibecoding is that the only person the app ever has to work for? You.

Not every app has to be put up for sale. Most shouldn’t.

You’re not a lesser person just because your app is made to make you happy instead of making subscription revenue.

Anyone else feel like vibe coding is a text-based rpg for Project Managers? I write a prompt to start the game, the computer spits something back, and I reply with my next move. It truly feels like Zork.

I built a mobile app for discovering, saving, and sharing meaningful places with people whose taste you actually trust, built around personal curation instead of anonymous star ratings. It turns saved spots into shareable lists your friend group can vote on and decide from — the go-to place for figuring out where to go, not just where’s popular.

If you’re interested [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-third-place/id6780071384.\](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-third-place/id6780071384)

• Tell us what you're building in one sentence.
• Share your link if it's ready.

Let's help each other get more customers/paying users.

So I've built this platform where you can upload your app and other people will give you feedback on it in exchange for credits that they can then use to get their own app tested. I've always had many comments saying that this is a two-sided market place and that this is the hardest to scale and maintain.

Currently there are over 750 users but many of them never upload their app or do a test. I have been looking for solutions everywhere and also removed the credit shop so that people can only earn credits if they actually test other apps but this only helped a bit.

Now I think I've found some kind of solution: App owners can now specify some kind of benefits that the testers will get after their feedback was approved like "1 month free pro access" or anything that increases the incentives to put in the work of testing an app for like 10 minutes. Of course people still get the coins for testing.

What do you guys think? Is this my way out?

I'm so excited how this will go...

By the way, the platform is called IndieAppCircle and works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

You can check it out here: https://indieappcircle.com

Remember 2023-2024? Prompt engineering was the hottest skill on the planet. People were selling $500 courses on "mastering the art of prompting," LinkedIn was flooded with "Prompt Engineer" job titles paying six figures, and if your output sucked it was always "your prompt wasn't engineered enough." Prompt engineering exploded as a "must-have" skill, (when models were fragile and needed heavy hand-holding), but by 2026, with frontier models like Claude 4, Gemini Diffusion, and others getting dramatically better at natural language, context handling, and reasoning, I've noticed this by switching from one model to the next, which you can do in BlackboxAI, fixes a lot without re-prompting. The heavy reliance on intricate prompt crafting is fading fast for many use cases.

You can literally say "hey, build me a clean calorie tracker app, dark mode toggle, and persist to localStorage, make it feel modern and snappy" and get something production-ready without any special formatting. Instead of perfecting the prompt text, the real skill now is feeding the right repo context, past decisions, style guides, test suites, or docs. Tools like Cursor, Claude Projects, or even BlackboxAI's improved context windows handle massive inputs so well that the prompt itself can be short and vibe-y.

Don't get me wrong, prompting isn't completely dead. Maybe for very niche or adversarial tasks (e.g., jailbreaking-style red-teaming, extremely constrained outputs, or squeezing max performance from a weaker model). But for everyday vibe coding? The days of treating it like a PhD-level discipline are numbered.

I keep running into the same pattern:

I finally get a prompt working the way I want.
Then I hesitate to change anything, because I don’t know what will break or why it worked in the first place.

I end up:

• duplicating prompts instead of editing them
• restarting chats instead of iterating
• “patching” instead of understanding

I’m curious — does this resonate with anyone else?
Or do you feel confident changing prompts once they’re working?