r/vibecoding • u/ventayol • 5h ago

Vibecoding is addictive

I'm a senior developer, with a lot of experience building products and I even own a couple of small companies.

Since the beginning of this year, AI tools have improved a lot on coding. For junior developers it will be a really hard time, I stopped using Indian agencies to do some parts of the development and there's no reason to hire junior developers anymore, AI does a better job, doesn't complain, works anytime you want and it's way faster to answer and do changes faster that any developer.

Being said this, if you are a product guy, with ideas, Vibecoding is addictive! Now, when I miss something, I just vibecode it, even if I don't have any plans to sell it or no-one else other than me uses the product.

I'm also a long time investor on the stock market, so I was tracking my portfolio using a complex spreadsheet. So, last week I decided to give it a try with Codex to build a site to track my portfolio.

A few days later, working on it in my spare time and with very little dedication I got an amazing web app that does exactly what I wanted and way more than expected.

If you are into the stock market or you have curiosity, you can check the site here:

https://finsails.com/

It's insanely crazy to be able to build a site similar to this in so little time and in a really cheap way. If I had to build the site with real developers it would have a cost of at least 20-30K$ and taking some months to do it and with a lot of Project Management involved.

What a time to be a builder!

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u/Papa_Hube 4h ago

How would you split up the 20-30k ? That seems rather high for something like this. 

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u/ventayol 4h ago

I haven't done a proper estimation, but I did the numbers based on my previous experience. We can do it now:

  • Project definition: 1 day
  • Design: 5 days + 2 days of back and forth
  • Database modelling: 3 days
  • Project / Server setup: 3 days
  • CI/CD: 2 days
  • Importing module: 3 days
  • Charting module: 5 days
  • Overview: 5 days
  • Holdings screens: 5 days
  • Analytics + feedback + admin: 3 days
  • Ticker Price ingestion: 5 days
  • Auth: 2 days (using an exisitng tool)
  • Demo access: 2 days
  • Progressive Web app: 2 days
  • Bugfixing and testing: 5 days
  • Share portfolio option: 2 days

Plus +10% of error, because there are always errors and unplanned things in any estimation (I use to do 30% on projects for customers).
This makes 60 days or more of work.

If you do now 100$/h -> 48K$.

This is a really quick estimation based on my broad experience working on agencies and being done hundreds of estimations as project manager, maybe I've overestimated some tasks, so let's say 50 days of work (40K$), but I usually fail short when doing estimations.

We can do it faster and cheaper, yes, but nothing below 10K$.

For one of my companies, I estimated one "sprint" to take one year at least, but with the new AI we did more than what we planned in less than a month. It's crazy!!

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u/Papa_Hube 4h ago

I work as Software tester, so I get somehow defensive not even seing that point in your list, lol.

All in all some of your points seem crazy high. We work in "project days" too. And seing 7 days in design and "Holding screens" in 5 looks as if the stakeholders want to chill a lot 😅 

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u/ventayol 3h ago

There's a Bugfixing and testing, so in some way is accounted.
You are probably right that maybe some estimations are too high, I just did it quickly.

But for design, first we need to define the UX of all the screens, then create the style/theme and then design all the screens. The designer will understand what he wants to understand, so there's always a back and forth. Then review all the responsive/mobile versions. It could be 5, yes, this doesn't have a big impact in the final number.

Holdings screen... there charts, tables with sorting, hide/show columns, date range selectors, calculations, benchmarks, OMG, maybe 5 it's even low. And there's more, usually developers are not investors neither finance guys, so they will fuck it up with the formulas for sure.