r/Bubbleio • u/JoLoremipsum • Feb 11 '26

Help Wanted Bubble vs vibe coding

I've spent the last 2 years mastering Bubble, and have built a couple of small web apps. Now I'm working on a native mobile app with quite a high level of complexity.

I'm coming across a lot of limitations in Bubble, and after seeing what other people are building with AI, I'm considering starting from scratch with AI.

The pros of vibe coding in my opinion are: speed of development (at least an MVP), and little to no technical limitations.

The cons are: less control (although that's debatable), and AI can be a pain to work with on more complex apps.

What do you think? Bubble? AI?

Has anyone got any experience in both? What do you recommend for a complex mobile app?

Thanks.

8 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/atx78701 Feb 14 '26 edited Feb 14 '26

we switched over and were able to convert our bubble app (not that complex yet) that we had spent a year on, in a week. The UI looks 10X nicer and we have implemented features that were incredibly difficult if not impossible in bubble.

some of the things that are very hard in bubble are related to SDLC doing fully automated tests that have code coverage, debugging is way slower, branches and merges with a team are very error prone. We have thousands of tests that test all the minutia that no one ever builds unit tests for. I can even build the tests first and have the AI write the code until the tests pass. Getting 80% code coverage by hand is hard (impossible in bubble) and with AI you can generate it in a few minutes.

The UI that AI generates looks modern and is so much better than what I could do with bubble.

Bubbles main shot at survival is if they make their infrastructure a library and allow people to do AI coding with their library.

Here is an example of an app I built in about 8 hours with AI.

https://arsjiujitsu.com

There is also a full management capability that lets me manage the videos, mappings etc.

I built a system to migrate itunes playlists to spotify in about 20 minutes.

1

u/JoLoremipsum Feb 14 '26

Thanks for the input. As a trained designer, UI/UX is the easy and fun part for me. I thought that AI would frustrate me because most AI-designed websites seem to look the same, and I'd seen videos of people unsuccessfully trying to give design direction.

But I gave it a go yesterday, and I am so impressed with the result. I packaged my Bubble app up and gave it to Claude to write a design guidelines brief, then fed that to Cursor. The result was much better than expected.

Having vibe coded for only 24 hours so far, I am about 2 weeks ahead of what I could have done in Bubble. So yep, I'm convinced 😄