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

kanfa.macbudkowski.com

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

#71

Post by serial_dev »

s1mon wrote: post #52
raincole wrote: post #49

They're... launching an NFT product in 2026... I know it's not the point of this article, but really?

Yep. As much as the rest of it resonated with LLM coding experiences I'm having, the NFT thing is unfortunate.

The way I see it, the NFT part is actually just for convenience to distribute AI generated images.

It could have been a web app, but with NFTs and Farcaster miniapps, you market to people who are willing and able to spend using their wallet instead of asking “normies” for credit card information for a 2 dollar custom image (that you could also prompt out of a free Gemini session).

With Farcaster, you also already have the profile picture of the user, one less hurdle again.

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

#72

Post by Uptrenda »

I mean the worst part about this is the author also vibe coded their security. It could have been much more catastrophic if they built a crypto wallet or trading system. But because it was NFTs I guess the max damage was limited.

I have to say its a little sad that so many devs think of security and cryptography in the same way as library frameworks. In that they see it as just some black box API to use for their projects rather than respecting that its a fully developed, complex field that demands expertise to avoid mistakes.

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

#73

Post by grim_io »

matt_heimer wrote: post #45
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 b…

Wouldn't Java always lose in terms of latency against a similarly optimized native code in, let's say, C(++)?

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

#74

Post by WarmWash »

sieste wrote: post #43
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…

I don't think people are grasping yet that this is the future of software, if by no metric other than "most software used is created by the user".

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

#75

Post by bauerd »

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…

>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.

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

#77

Post by westurner »

westurner wrote: post #51

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 h…

> 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?

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

#78

Post by 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.

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

#79

Post by 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.

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

#80

Post by Lerc »

stavros wrote: post #31
esafak wrote: post #11

Look at the screenshots to understand what the author means by 'product'.

We don't need to shit on someone who shared their experiences and thoughts.

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.
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