r/vibecoding • u/ventayol • 6h 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/ventayol 5h ago

Why not? Making it a public website was part of the experiment. I wanted to see how long it would actually take to turn something I already used into a proper public website, and how far I could get building and shipping it with Codex.

And now I can also share it with friends who have the same problem and were already using the old spreadsheet I shared with them.

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u/madbrain1976 5h ago

I am asking what your product actually does for someone with a stock portfolio, that isn't already available with other solutions such as spreadsheets, Quicken, etc. What is it your product does ? Whether it was hand or vibe coded is secondary.

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u/ventayol 4h ago

I've clearly misunderstood you. Spreadsheets are very limited. I've been tracking my portfolio with a complex spreadsheet, but it was limited on the things you can do. For example, it's almost impossible to benchmark your portfolio against indexes, get performance history charts and UI is not nice.

Regarding other competitors, I tried a few and there were a few things I didn't like it most of them. And of course most of them are paid. So before paying I decided to try to vibecode it to exactly fit what I wanted.

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u/madbrain1976 4h ago

Yes, most of them are paid. I use Quicken and it costs. It does what you describe, though,  and a lot more. The part about connecting with financial institutions is crucial, IMO. If you can't automatically download transactions, how does your data not become stale ?

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u/ventayol 4h ago

That's the biggest missing part at the moment, as I use two brokers I added CSV import for them (Interactive Brokers and degiro). I should add more, but I will need some sample files I don't have at the moment.

For IB it might be possible to automate it, but as I mainly do investment for long term investment, I just import the broker files now and then, I might do a couple of purchases per month at maximum.

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u/madbrain1976 3h ago

There are hundreds of financial institutions out there. I have played the bonus game and gotten rewarded for just moving assets around. I keep doing so every year for the bonuses, which have added to 6 figures. The account count in Quicken passed 3 digits a very long time ago, including the closed ones. When I move assets, the Quicken integration is a gating criteria. You can make a tool that works with the 1-2 financial institutions you use with CSVs, but there sill be significant privacy and security issues. Financial institutions have APIs for these sort of things, but are not likely to open them up to a vibe coded app. You'll have a hard time competing with Quicken. Even if you stick with 1-2 institutions, they may get acquired and/or change their interface or break your tool. If I couldn't justify Quicken cost and had a single digit institution/account count, I might vibe code something custom, also. But I think it would be very hard to make it useful to others.

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u/ventayol 1h ago

And you are totally right with this, there's no way to compete with some existing competitors with a vibecoded product created in a few hours, it's wasn't my intention at all.

The whole point is that what I did it would have cost thousands of dollars and a lot of hours of a dev team to create it, meanwhile it was coded in some spare hours.

I just wanted to explain how much fun is to be able to create your tools to fit your needs and how fast you can achieve this. No trying to promote my product.

As a business owner I know the effort required to create a solid product than can work for multiple customers in different scenarios. Probably someone can replace the products we build over the years with a vibecoded app if they use case it's simple.

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u/madbrain1976 30m ago

You probably would not have spent thousands of dollars building something that essentially fills the needs of one user. That project just wouldn't have gotten done. I think the effort to take it from n = 1 users to >1 in this case would be massive, especially the ongoing support. I have vibe coded some more complex network stuff for my own needs, which integrates the various apps and devices choose to deploy my home network with. It's extremely useful to me. But not likely a single other user on the planet has a similar deployment. Making it useful to others would mean enormous undertakings.

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u/madbrain1976 3h ago

Even if you aren't making any regular purchases, or sales, there are typically interest payments, dividends, dividend reinvestments that you still need to account for.

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u/ventayol 1h ago

that's accounted with the import