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

kanfa.macbudkowski.com

151–160 of 362 posts

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

#151
I’m sure someone else has probably coined the term before me (or it’s just me being dumb, often the case) but I’ve started calling this phase of SWE ‘Ricky Bobby Development’.

So many people are just shouting ‘I wanna go fast’ and completely forgetting the lessons learned over the past few decades. Something is going to crash and burn, eventually.

I say this as a daily LLM user, albeit a user with a very skeptical view of anything the LLM puts in front of me.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call it "Psychics for Programmers." People will scoff at psychics and fortune telling and palm reading, but then the same people will listen to Elon or some founder or VC and be utterly convinced that that person is a visionary and can describe the future.

It's just reading the room. People hate having to use their computers through the lens of quasi-robot humans (saying that as one of those robots). They hate having to pay monthly just so dumb features and UI overhauls can be pushed on them. They just want the software to do the few things they need it to do. AI labs are falling over themselves to remove the gate keeping regular people from using their computing devic…

> the progress there in the last few years is nothing short of absolutely astounding

Yet, all the astounding progress notwithstanding, I don't have a suite of bespoke tools replacing the ones I depend on. I cannot say "hey claude, make me a suite of bespoke software infrastructure monitoring and operational tooling tailored to my specific needs" and expect anything more than a giant headache and wasted time. So maybe we just need to wait? Or maybe it's just not actually real. My view is unless you show me a working demo it's vaporware. Show me that the problem is solved, don't tell me that it might be solved later sometime.

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

#153

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…

I've seen SQL injection and leaked API tokens to all visitors of a website :)

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

#154

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.

https://xkcd.com/1205/ (is it worth the time matrix)

LLM's change the calculus of the above chart dramatically.

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

whatever you prototype - the one who built it in 6 month will have economy of scale to make it cheaper than your diy solution, and because they serve many customers and developed it for 6 months - their product will be 100x better than the one you diy there is very very rare use case when diy makes sense. in 99% of cases its just a toy that feels nice as you kinda did it. but if you factor in the time etc it is alway…

Based on your earlier comment and your last paragraph, your impression of AI vibe coding ability is at least a year out of date.

In late 2024 it might have taken 6 months. Today, two weeks, maybe 3.

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

#156

[flagged]

I don't know how other people work, but writing the code for me has been essential in even understanding the problem space. The architecture and design work in a lot of cases is harder without going through that process.

This. It’s also much easier to tell someone what you don’t like if what you don’t like is right in front of you than to tell them what you want without a point of reference.

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

#157

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…

> AI really wants to use Project Panama

It would help if you briefly specified the AI you are using here. There are wildly different results between using, say, an 8B open-weights LLM and Claude Opus 4.6.

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

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

AI is extremely good at the things that it has many examples for. If what you are doing is novel then it is much less of a help, and it is far more likely to start hallucinating because 'I don't know' is not in the vocabulary of any AI.

> because 'I don't know' is not in the vocabulary of any AI.

That is clearly false. I’m only familiar with Opus, but it quite regularly tells me that, and/or decides it needs to do research before answering.

If I instruct it to answer regardless, it generally turns out that it indeed didn’t know.

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

#159

[flagged]

YES YES YES!! I so wish that we could go back in time and never, ever have even suggested anything other that what you say here. AI doesn't do it for you. It does it with you.

You have to figure out what you want before the AI codes. The thinking BEFORE is the entire game.

Though I will also say that I use Claude for working out designs a lot. Literally hours sometimes with long periods of me thinking it through.

And I still get a ton more done and often use tech that I would never have approached before these glory days.

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

#160
post #87

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…

> - This is partly b/c it is good at things I'm not good at (e.g. front end design) Everyone thinks LLMs are good at the things they are bad at. In many cases they are still just giving “plausible” code that you don’t have the experience to accurately judge. I have a lot of frontend app dev experience. Even modern tools (Claude w/Opus 4.6 and a decent Claude.md) will slip in unmaintainable slop in frontend changes. I…

It’s the Gell-Mann amnesia effect applied to LLM instead of media
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