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The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

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Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#41

Post by niemandhier »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #26
niemandhier wrote: post #4

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.

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.

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.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#42

Post by 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.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#43

Post by sieste »

niemandhier wrote: post #4

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.

Related anecdote: My 12yo son didn't like the speed cubing online timer he was using because it kept crashing the browser and interrupted him with ads. Instead of googling a better alternative we sat down with claude code and put together the version of the website that behaved and looked exactly as he wanted. He got it working all by himself in under an hour with less than 10 prompts, I only helped a bit putting it online with github pages so he can use it from anywhere.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#44

Post by _heimdall »

jimnotgym wrote: post #37

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?

That's a great approach, though I'd also recommend setting up a strong basis for linting, type checking, compilation, etc depending on the language. An LLM given a full test suite and guard rails of basic code style rules will likely do a pretty good job.

I would find it a bit tricky to write a full test suite for a product without any code though. You'd need to understand the architecture a bit and likely end up assuming, or mocking, what helpers, classes, config, etc will be built.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#45

Post by matt_heimer »

alexpotato wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#46

Post by jcgrillo »

niemandhier wrote: post #4

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.

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.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#47

Post by kami23 »

lacedeconstruct wrote: post #9
niemandhier wrote: post #4

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.

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

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.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#48

Post by Aperocky »

alexpotato wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#50

Post by mlaretallack »

jimnotgym wrote: post #37

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?

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.
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