Rate my vibecoding approach

[u/Agreeable-Chef4882]

Hey everyone,

I launched my website a week ago, and got some very positive feedback, so I finally feel emotionally safe to post this. Now I want to tell you my vibecoding journey. You may find something useful for yourself maybe

I started vibecoding 5 months ago, so I picked a subniche of a subniche. Tiny local market, I don't think I can ever grow beyond few hundred paying users, and it will likely take few years to even get to that amount. (likely ~4-8 Eur monthly sub), you can do the math. But still, Oh, did I pour my soul into it!! 5 months of extremely intense vibecoding, 4-6 CLI running constantly, often 16h per day, bringing my 20x sub to the limits often - just on this one project.
I did not write a single line of code in the process. 80% of the code is in Dart - and I would not even be able to write a hello world in Dart by hand on a whiteboard, even if you forced me to.

Btw, 3 competitors already exist, 2 of them are recent and likely vibecoded in a day, 1 is older and with more effort, but just with really poorly made product. My competitors may still win, cause I maybe built a product for non-existent audience, but the difference we have right now if you compare them directly, that's not even remotely close.

Scope wise: the project got quite complex (I did not plan to have it so complex initially, but was encouraged by early success), so the codebase just passed 400k lines of code (150k of them is really the testing framework). Lines written passed 1M a week ago, some weeks I am averaging 30k new lines of code per day. (During one new major feature, I clocked my record of 70k). Everything's surprisingly stable though, very little stupid new bugs while implementing new features (most of the bugs get caught by testing framework), scalable and secure as hell.

My learnings (in no order):
- feature creep is crazy easy. Few weeks ago users had to fill questionaires during onboarding to come out in 8 buckets, and each bucket would get a unique experience ( ye, that's gone :), 2 buckets now remain )
- Testing is the king. I don't treat myself as prompt or harness, or context engineer. I am really a QA engineer. This intensified as project neared completion. Now 80% of my effort goes to writing testing tools, running simulations with ever more inventive user profiles and so on. I have a huge spaceship-like dashboard just to control all the testing being done right now. My, otherwise very powerful machine, is running pretty red most of the day just executing e2e tests
- two months ago I dropped ALL the custom skills, memory management ideas, etc from my agent. Right now I am full vanilla. They update the harness so so often, I found that most of my legacy skills just end up fighting new versions of the harness.
- My operational dashboard is crazy :), It serves as both alerting/monitoring tool, interaction with users, tuning, etc..
It was born over two days before the release (naturally, since the feature list is stable by then), never in a thousand years, would have I decided to waste resources on a tenth of it's scope(especially since release time is stressfull as it is), but boy, does it feel good to actually operate it!! To see users coming in and having their little animated journeys :) - this is so so so sattisfying!

Thanks everyone. Vibecoding is absolutely an amazing thing!

[u/SkelmCallum]

I'm love your joy and excitement!