alt Hacker NewsMaybe people don't cite specific apps because they like their jobs, and outing apps as vibe-coded is still seen as negative
I personally know of two completely vibe-coded large apps in my professional environment. One by a non-technical manager, made to solve his needs, then sold to customers. Initial development went along great, but by now velocity has greatly slowed down. Also took a lot of engineering hours (of actual software developers) to get permission management from "chaotic and ineffective" to passable. It's still worse than what you would have gotten by just using a couple sentences of the right technical language at the start. Deployment is also a bit of a nightmare. All in all, anything beyond the first rollout phase was delayed by months. Honestly it should have stayed as a prototype that then gets rebuilt from the ground up. But still, it is a real app, making real revenue
The other example was vibe-coded by a software engineer in his free time. Works pretty well, doesn't have too many bugs. Makes some revenue, but a lot less. Solving manager problems just sells better.
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> Honestly it should have stayed as a prototype that then gets rebuilt from the ground up.
And that’s a natural process for many products. In the journey from discovery to prototype to MVP to product, it should be rebuilt multiple times.
Particularly with LLM’s to assist, the process of rebuilding from a new context and understanding of the desired goal requires even less effort.
The hardest part is managing any real users, their expectations, and any data / workflows they’ve come to require from what came before.
I vibecoded a Postman/Insomnia API tester program, and I use it everyday at work now.
But as another software engineer, I remove myself from that comparison, because the idea is to find out if a non technical person can do the same, that's the definition of vibe coding.