Discussion
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.
ianm218: Can you expand on this? You definitely don’t need 6 months for a note taking app to be useable it is more you need to compete with the state of the art right
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.
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.
keyle: I built a jira with attachments and all sorts of bells and whistles. Purrs like a kitten. Saas are going extinct. At least the jobs that charged $1000 a day to write jira plugins.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm: >with all vibe coding in the world today you still need at least 6 months full time to build a nice note taking app.Bad example, note apps loaded with features are anti-productive and are for people who treat note taking as a hobby itself.You have Obsidian anyway if you want something open source.
margalabargala: You seem to be making the assumption that "app" means "sellable product", rather than "one off that works for me". It doesn't.When everyone is able to make their own one off prototype in 30 minutes, no one will pay for the thing that took someone 6 months.
utopiah: I'd argue you need between 6 minutes and 6 years.It depends entirely on what you want. You can literally code a JavaScript 1-liner that will make a <textarea> then put the content back in the URL and it will work serverless on pretty much any platform with a Web browser.You can also write a note taking app that will be federated yet private, that will have its own scripting language, etc. I mean you can yak-shave your way to write your own OS or even designing your own CPU for that.So... I'm not sure that metric, time, means much without a proper context, including who does it. It's quite different if to do that, regardless of the tooling used, if you are a professional developer, designer, fullstack dev, prototypist, PM, marketer, writer, etc.
dielll: I have had the experience with creating https://swiftbook.dev/learnUsed 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.
weird-eye-issue: What universe do you live in
IAmGraydon: This is a pipe dream and “sufficiently advanced” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. You really think people would rather spin up and debug their own self-made software rather than pay for something that has been tested, debugged, and proven by thousands of users? Why would anyone do that for anything more than a very simple script? It makes zero sense unless the LLM outputs literally perfect one-shot software reliably.
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.
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.
etothet: I noticed this as well. I had to look it up. Apparently ‘pfp’ means ‘profile picture’.
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.
lacedeconstruct: I dont want that though, I want someone to spend much more time than I can afford thinking about and perfecting a product that I can pay for and dont worry about it
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm: If we could return to one-off payments without dark patterns I would agree. Hopefully at least the software that rely on grift will start to vanish.
ivan_gammel: Some minor UX enhancement SaaS of the most recent VC-funded wave will do. Maybe those who forgot how to invest in R&D and spent last 20 years just fixing bugs. There’s plenty of SaaS on the market that offers added value beyond the code. Data brokers. Domain experts, etc. Even if homemade solution is sometimes possible, initial development costs are going to be just one of several important factors in choosing whether to build or to buy.
esafak: Look at the screenshots to understand what the author means by 'product'.
spiderfarmer: This would have been generic slop if it wasn't for AI.
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 SengstanAs 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.
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.
niemandhier: Perplexity just launched a tool that builds and hosts small bespoke tools.I tried it works wells. I can do the same thing in my Linux machine, but even my 12 year old now can get perplexity to build him a tool to compare ram prices at different chinease vendors.
pydry: jira is a perfect example of an abysmal product that was marketed well.
raincole: They're... launching an NFT product in 2026...I know it's not the point of this article, but really?
s1mon: Yep. As much as the rest of it resonated with LLM coding experiences I'm having, the NFT thing is unfortunate.
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"?
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?
mlaretallack: Yes, I mostly do spec driven developement. And at the design stage, I always add in tests. I repeat this pattern for any new features or bug fixes, get the agent to write a test (unit, intergration or playwright based), reproduce the issue and then implement the change and retest etc... and retest using all the other tests.
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.
Aperocky: The magic is testing. Having locally available testing and high throughput testing with high amount of test cases now unlocks more speed.The test cases themselves becomes the foci - the LLM usually can't get them right.
kami23: And some people do, both things can be true. I'd rather make a tool just for me that breaks when I introduce a new requirement and I just add into it and keep going.
jcgrillo: How many products are actually like that? If I could easily replace github, datadog/sentry/whatever, cloudflare, aws, tailscale that would be great. In my view building and owning is better than buying or renting. Especially when it comes to data--it would be much better for me to own my telemetry data for example than to ship it off to another company. But I don't think you (or anyone) will be vibecoding replacements for these services anytime soon. They solve big, hard, difficult problems.
matt_heimer: I'm building a Java HFT engine and the amount of things AI gets wrong is eye opening. If I didn't benchmark everything I'd end up with much less optimized solution.Examples: AI really wants to use Project Panama (FFM) and while that can be significantly faster than traditional OO approaches it is almost never the best. And I'm not taking about using deprecated Unsafe calls, I'm talking about using primative arrays being better for Vector/SIMD operations on large sets of data. NIO being better than FFM + mmap for file reading.You can use AI to build something that is sometimes better than what someone without domain specific knowledge would develop but the gap between that and the industry expected solution is much more than 100 hours.
FpUser: I am curious about what causes some to choose Java for HFT. From what I remember the amount of virgin sacrifices and dances with the wolves one must do to approach native speed in this particular area is just way too much of development time overhead.
jsdalton: The metaphor that’s popped into my head recently is baking bread.You can learn to bake good bread. It’s not _that_ hard. And it’ll probably taste better than store bought bread.But it almost certainly won’t be cheaper. And it’ll take a more more time and effort.Still, sometimes you might bake your own bread for kicks. But most of the time, you’ll just buy the bread someone else has already perfected.
CuriouslyC: Github is on the chopping block as a tool (it's sticky as a social network). The other stuff not so much.The things that are going away are tools that provide convenience on top of a workflow that's commoditized. Anything where the commercial offering provides convenience rather than capabilities over the open source offerings is gonna get toasted.
jcgrillo: Even at recent levels of uptime I think it would be very difficult to build a competing product at the scale of even a small company (10 engineers). How would you implement Actions? Code review comments/history? Pull requests? Issues? All of these things have serious operational requirements. If you just want some place to store a git repository any filesystem you like will do it but when you start talking about replacing github that's a different story altogether and TBH I don't think building something that appears to function the same is even the hard part, it's the scaling challenges you run into very quickly.
tim-projects: 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. I was amazed.But that's just a prototype. To turn it into a full multi user scaleable product... I'm still at it a year later. It's 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 to to 8 his unattended 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. Of I accepted everything the ai wanted finishing anything would be impossible.
bethekidyouwant: Why did this crypto grifter AI app get traction on this site?
__mp: yes. depending on the techstack your experience might be better or worse. HTML/CSS/React/Go worked great, but it struggled with Swift (which I had no experience in).
xp84: Yeah I’ve always found that a cringe initialism given that it’s not Pro File Picture. I would just say avatar.
westurner: Is 100 hours enough?A 40-hour work year has 2,080 hours per person per year.The "10,000" hours necessary to be really good at anything number was the expert threshold that they used to categorize test subjects who performed neuroimaging studies while compassion meditating. "10,000" hours to be an expert is about 5 years at full time.But how many hours to have a good software product?Usually I check for tests and test coverage first. You could have spent 1,000 hours on a software project and if it doesn't have automated tests, we can't evolve the software and be sure that we haven't caused regressions.
linsomniac: To expand on the "Yes": the AI tools work extremely well when they can test for success. Once you have the tests as you'd like them, you may want to tell the LLM not to modify the tests because you can run into situations where it'll "fix" the tests rather than fixing the code.
capitalsigma: Also the process sounds like a nightmare: "it broke and I asked 4 different LLMs to fix it; my `AGENTS.md` file contained hundreds of special cases; etc." I thought this article was intended to be a horror story, not an advertisement
101008: SaaS are not going exctinct. This reminds me of the LinkedIn posts saying they clone Slack in two hours, copying the UI, etc. Yeah, if you think Slack is private chat rooms then you should use IRC for your company.One of the most valuable things about Slack is the ecosystem: apps, API support, etc. If you need to receive notifications from external apps (like PageDuty or Incident.io or something like that), good luck expecting them having a setup for your own version of the app. Yeah, some of them provide webhooks (not all of them), but in the end you have to maintain that too...
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.
stavros: We don't need to shit on someone who shared their experiences and thoughts.
Lerc: I agree with you point, but I do look sidelong at the number of points the post has. It is, at the very least, unexpected.
marginalia_nu: The more I evaluate Claude Code, the more it feels like the world's most inconsistent golfer. It can get within a few paces of the hole in often a single strike, and then it'll spend hours, days, weeks trying to nail the putt.There's some 80-20:ness to all programming, but with current state of the art coding models, the distribution is the most extreme it's ever been.
dehrmann: > 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.
westurner: > That's really impressive for something that you only spent that much time on"Again, I haven't even read this particular project;There's:Prompt insufficiency: Was the specification used to prompt the model to develop the software sufficient in relation to what are regarded as a complete enough software specifications?Model and/or Agent insufficiency,Software Development methods and/or Project Management insufficiency,QA insufficiency,Peer review sufficiency;Is it already time to rewrite the product using the current project as a more sufficient specification?But then how many hours of UI and business logic review would be necessary again?
quickrefio: The speed of prototyping right now is wild.The interesting shift seems to be that building the first version is no longer the bottleneck — distribution, UX polish and reliability are.
bauerd: >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)Absolutely. Tight feedback loops are essential to coding agents and you can’t run pipelines locally.
