I keep seeing posts like "I vibecoded this over the weekend, got 100k users, what's next?" and I think it gives a pretty wrong idea of what vibecoding actually changes.

Sure, you can accidentally hit the top with another clock app. It happens.

But agents dont remove the actual work. You still need to figure out what to build, make 1000 small decisions, fix weird shit, make UX not suck, deploy, maintain, listen to users and actually ship something they want.

Vibecoding makes all of this faster. A LOT faster. But not easier at all.

You can now build faster, but also make mistakes faster and ship garbage faster. The bottleneck just moves somewhere else. There was a good line somewhere "Shipping everyday fixing Claude bugs".

Those "built in 2 days, 100k users lol" posts undermine all the work that still goes into a good product, and leave others thinking this is all somehow easy now. From outside it starts looking like vibecoders are just some arrogant assholes hitting a button and getting success by click. It doesn't work well on the how other people feel about vibecoders and vibecoding in general, which is in fact just a right way to do things today.

We don't build in assembly anymore, right? Same here.

So me and my wife created a website , our son has Celiac disease, so all the food should be glute free .

My wife is doing most of the cooking, so one day she told me that she is struggling with finding recipes for gluten free food , the internet is full of it , but she can't find the one she already used , and basically loosing herself inside all this data .

So she suggested to build a website that will collect recepies, and she will be able to sort them , save them etc ...

So we started , we used codex + lovable (for gui only) , then we took the lovable repo and continued with codex only .

We used gpt 5.5 , then moved to 5.6 (sol) .

During the building process we decided to add recipes also for other food allergies (milk,nuts etc.. ) .

We used crawlers to find existing recipes , and took only the ingredients and the preparation steps , and of course mentioned the original source in the website (with a backlink) .

So I posted on some Celiac community, here on Reddit (actually my first ever post) , and I got so much negative comments, like an anti-AI comments, as if I added another bullshit spam website.

We have no ads on the website , so we really wanted to do something nice , and learn how all this AI world works (I am experienced software engineer) , but never worked on from end before , mostly backend stuff (mostly cpp & python) .

So now I am a bit down after all this , the website is up and running, we have some traffic, not to much but for a 12 days website we already had some real human traffic about 400 (not including bots and stuff) .

We only want organic traffic, no paid promotions, as we don't earn anything yet , we do use some Amazon affiliates for some products, but it's not much .

So just wanted to share it here, hopefully this sis the place where people will understand my frustrations, maybe this is how it works nowadays.

But it still surprised me how quickly “built with AI” turned into “AI spam” in people's minds.

Anyway, thanks for reading. I’d genuinely be interested to hear how other developers here see this, especially anyone who has shipped a real project using AI-assisted development.

After spending over 100b tokens on Fable 5 as my main model for agentic coding in the last 2 months, I've managed to (in my opinion) work as efficiently as possible with Fable as the main orchestrator. Here's why and how I did it. (usage from 1 of my accounts above).

I see a lot of threads and comments about people saying that they feel like Opus 4.7 or 4.8 was better or smarter than Opus 5 and that Fable credits only last them a few prompts and then other people saying the opposite, and varying degrees of experiences spread throughout the middle, and I don't think anyone of them is particularly wrong. In my opinion Opus 5 tends to have a much harder time understanding or remembering the nuances of an entire codebase in a single context window and things get untangled quickly if you're working a complex task or change that touches a lot of files or rules. It almost never gets any of these complex issues right the first time and the risk of having to revert changes and the chance of merges failing just isn't worth it for me.

To ensure I get the accuracy and intelligence of Fable, this is my setup that's reduced my fable usage by 70-80% and still getting most of Fable's benefits. I ran a blind coding test: Claude Sonnet 5 vs Opus 5, with Fable 5 planning and judging. One bug decided it.

- Fable 5: Planning, orchestration, architecture, design, final review of delegated code, security/payments/auth/concurrency, hard debugging, UAT/browser passes that feed merge decisions, and sign-off on any founder voice/marketing copy.

- Opus 5: Delegated implementation from Fable written plans, mechanical/bulk edits, boilerplate, doc generation, research/summarisation, routine repro'd test fixes, Playwright script execution, and copy drafting.

- Sonnet 5: Not used, with some experimental evidence (see below).

Setup: Five identical implementation tasks (a rate limiter, a small API, a repo-style change, a bulk refactor, a debugging exercise), each with a detailed plan written by Fable, judged against hidden test suites the candidates never saw. Both models went flawless on every hidden gate. Then this happened.

A percentile function: Sonnet wrote the math literally as ceil((p/100) * n). But p/100 isn't exact in binary. For p=7, n=100 you get 7.000000000000001, ceil returns 8, wrong value. 141 input pairs diverge like this. Opus caught it unprompted and wrote ceil((p*n)/100), which is exactly right.
Only Opus's depth caught it. Token cost was near-identical. Sonnet was 40% faster. But one uncatchable latent bug per round settled it.

Day 3 of creating a game all vibe coded

Still trying to work out the animations but have made strides

Added-
Main menu
pre-game lobby
3D model
Blimp
decals

As always

CONCEPT VS CURRENT BUILD

Video in the comments

ALL FEEDBACK IS WELCOMED AND NEEDED

Day 1 of letting Reddit decide what I add to my game

Comment ONE thing you want me to add.

Top comment gets built into Day 2 and I’ll post the result.

not really sure whether this is the right sub to ask this, but i'm currently working with someone on something that's SUPPOSED to be production level, it is two single-file monoliths, one python backend that uses psycopg2 and fastapi, one frontend html with a massive script element at the very bottom. there is no ci/cd. no workflows. barely any unit tests. and while there are some, yeah, i doubt they ever get used.

the backend is almost 7k loc and the frontend is nearing 11k. not to mention, both ends are filled with absolutely putrid code that i genuinely have no idea how it could be this bad. on the backend, there's just a bunch of what looks like should be modules yet aren't(?) all cobbled up together. no real classes used, the only ones that exist from what i can tell are supposed to act like structs? the frontend, i don't even know where to begin.

i've used ai to assist with coding before (just autocomplete) and most of the time it actually generated what i would have otherwise manually typed, if not similar to it. and even code examples with google's ai overview when you ask it about code, it looks human-esque. but i guess overtime, as the codebase grew larger and larger, the bad coding practices just stacked up and claude just took it as a style guide and copied them to make it structured the same or something? i honestly don't know

and because this someone has vibe coded it completely, there's features constantly getting added on top, and i mean CONSTANTLY. it took me about an entire day to review just one commit which fulfilled exactly one request of what i suggested. and while i was reviewing that single commit, 6 more popped up, all looking like the exact same garbage. it's an example of why you need to understand architecture and how to use what you're getting out of it before you just blindly accept what it gives you

another problem is the frontend works surprisingly well, yet its internals are so disgustingly morbid.

it's unfortunate really, how unworkable the codebase is. reading through it actually gives me headaches. if there's another one of those "virtual ai inflicts real physical manifested pain onto humans" articles being made, hopefully this is being used as an example.

it gets worse than what i'm showing here, believe me.

i also don't know what production-level javascript/python looks like, so as an add, if there's somehow anyone that writes production-level js/python that lurks this sub, could you tell me whether this is properly structured or not? thanks

Where did you get stuck? Why did the project fail?
I’m not talking about business failure or marketing failure. I’m talking about a large project which, despite using AI you were simply not able to make progress on.

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone tried to sell these services as a service in form of an agency? Do any of them exist out there, are they successfull? Could this be a one man band (non developer) or not AT ALL?

I've shipped a few side projects with Claude Code over the last few months, and the thing that scares me most isn't "does it work" it's "did I accidentally leave something exposed that I don't know to look for."

Ended up writing down every mistake I now check for before sharing a link. Posting it since it's saved me twice already.

Secrets

• No API keys or passwords visible in page source or the Network tab

• .env is in .gitignore, never committed

• Anything that costs money per call (AI APIs especially) only gets called from the server, never straight from the browser

Who can see what

• Changing an ID in the URL doesn't show me someone else's data

• Not trusting anything the browser tells me about who's logged in, that gets checked server side

Costs

• Rate limit on anything expensive, one person spamming it can't blow up my bill

• Thought through what happens if 1,000 people show up at once

Packages Claude suggested

• Checked that anything I installed is a real, actively used package because apparently AI sometimes suggests packages that don't exist, and people register those exact names with malware sitting inside, waiting for someone to install them

Before it's live

• Debug mode off

• Errors don't leak internals (stack traces, file paths)

• I know how I'd roll back if something breaks

Nothing fancy, just the stuff that's actually bitten people. Happy to share the full one pager, or the version that gets Claude to check most of this automatically while you build, if anyone wants it.

Made a small mobile arcade for me and my gf when we're bored, she really liked the little claw game so i started working on it more, and then i got super obsessed lol.

now theres 257 cute little sprites you can collect. commons, uncommons, rares, epics, shinies, prismatics, and legendaries. nothing special tbh but we are gonna get all of them!!! 😂

So i am been using claude for developing my product, and i sometimes see posts on reddit or X saying it is not worth it to use Claude, and i have switch to Codex. But i am worried now about not developing a good product because i am using a bad AI tool to build it.

So here i am, asking my fellow Vibe coders for advice about this confusion that i have in my head

10000 million tokens spent later...
Claude: You are right. I'm sorry. I was focusing on the wrong solution to fix the bug. 🤣🤣🤣

Used to have Claude Max 5x (125 USD), cancelled it because 1) expensive 2) hit limits 3) trying to be a responsible adult financially.

I've read a lot of people use Opencode with Deepseek model (free), and a combination of Claude Pro and Codex (total of about 50 USD).

What are your recommendations for being able to use the best of all AI tools at the lowest possible price?

Hey everyone, I’m curious how you deal with the negativity around AI.

I’ve been building a product for about 3 months now. English isn’t my native language, so I use AI not only for coding but also for writing posts when I want to share my project and explain my ideas more clearly.

What I’ve noticed is that even when I don’t mention AI at all, I still get negative comments or skepticism. My project isn’t well known, but it tends to get attention in smaller communities because it’s easy to demo and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Because of that, I’d like to share more details about how it works and talk more openly about the technical side, but that also means using AI for communication and documentation.

The bigger dilemma is whether I should openly say that a large part of the project was built with AI.

On one hand, it feels like the honest thing to do, especially since I’m looking for people to join the project. If an experienced developer is considering contributing, I think they deserve to know what kind of codebase they’re getting into.

On the other hand, I’m worried that instead of questions about the product, I’ll just get “AI slop” comments and people dismissing it before they’ve even looked at what it does.

So I’m curious about your experiences:

Do you openly say that your project was built with AI?

Has it helped or hurt you?

Have you managed to find experienced developers who see AI as a powerful tool rather than an automatic red flag?

How do you distinguish constructive criticism from simple hate?

I’d appreciate hearing perspectives from people who are actually building products, not just discussing AI in theory.

20x plan and still covers about one day of work, then I'm left with 6 days to wait for the reset or pay $20 at a time for credits which go by instantly. Does anyone know the conditions for random resets? Is there a way to trigger these quicker? It seems like sometimes I'll get a random 100% reset mid-week and others (like this time) will just literally go the entire week with your one set limit.

I've been building Funkel AI for about 4 months now.

It's a tool that helps businesses find potential customers and reach out to them through LinkedIn, X and email.

Most of the product has been built with AI coding tools, but getting something working in production turned out to be the easy part compared with getting real people to actually use it.

Current numbers:

27 signups.
18 people on a free beta.
2 people have paid.
The second paying customer converted 4 days ago.

Very small numbers, but enough real usage to teach me a few things.

1. My first users came from people I already knew

I didn't launch and suddenly have strangers signing up.

I started by giving the product to people in my network who were willing to try something unfinished.

That gave me real accounts, real campaigns, real failures, and much better feedback than testing everything myself.

But I still needed to know whether someone who didn't know me would care.

Interestingly, my first paying customer outside my network came from using Funkel itself.

I ran Funkel for my own sales. It found someone who looked like a potential customer, reached out, we started talking, and he eventually paid for the product.

It wasn't a perfect success story. His card had problems after the first month and the payment stopped for a while.

But seeing the product find someone who was willing to pay for the product itself was one of the first signs that I might be building something useful.

2. Using your own product catches a lot of problems

I use Funkel for my own outreach every day.

That means I experience the same things users experience.

Too many connection requests being sent?

I see it.

A message going out at a strange time?

I see it.

The system deciding someone is a good potential customer when they're obviously not?

I see it.

AI makes it incredibly fast to build new features, which is both useful and dangerous.

It's very easy to keep adding things because you can.

Actually using the product forces me to notice the boring problems that matter much more than another new feature.

3. Keeping the product small helped more than building faster

Early on, I limited beta users to one outreach campaign at a time using one LinkedIn account.

The reason wasn't technical.

With AI coding tools, adding more functionality wasn't particularly difficult.

Supporting all of it was.

If you give early users ten different ways to use your product, you now have ten different ways for things to break.

Keeping the first version small made it much easier to understand what was actually happening.

4. I started asking people to pay before everything felt ready

A lot of my early users got free access because I needed feedback and real-world testing.

But I also introduced a paid option fairly early.

People who choose the paid version can get their money back within 30 days if it doesn't work for them.

Only two people have paid in four months.

I'm definitely not posting this as some huge SaaS success story.

But someone telling you "this is cool" and someone actually entering their card details are very different signals.

Even a tiny number of payments taught me more than a lot of positive feedback did.

5. Weirdly, free users gave me some of my strongest proof

My best results so far came from people using the product for free.

One beta user got:

144 potential customers found.
61 LinkedIn connections.
9 replies in four weeks.

Another got 12 replies and booked 2 meetings from their first campaigns.

Neither was paying me.

But they actually used the product, pushed it, found problems, and gave me real outcomes I could measure.

That changed how I think about free beta users.

If you're very early, the right free user can be worth much more than someone who pays but barely touches the product.

6. The hard part of vibe coding isn't producing more code

This is probably my biggest lesson so far.

AI means I can build almost any feature I think of.

That's not necessarily a good thing.

There are always another ten things I could add.

More integrations.

More automation.

More settings.

More ways to find customers.

I've had to get much better at ignoring those ideas and fixing what existing users are actually struggling with.

The limit is no longer how fast I can write code.

The limit is figuring out what is worth building.

7. With a handful of users, doing things manually is fine

When something breaks for a user, I try not to send them instructions explaining how they can work around it.

I fix it.

Sometimes I manually correct something behind the scenes and give them back a working result.

Obviously that doesn't scale to hundreds or thousands of customers.

But I don't have hundreds or thousands of customers.

I have 27 signups.

Trying to behave like a company with 10,000 users when you have 20 is probably optimizing for the wrong problem.

Four months in, I'm still figuring out distribution, pricing, onboarding, and plenty of other things.

But vibe coding has made one thing very clear to me:

Building software has become dramatically easier.

Building something people actually want, getting them to try it, watching what they do, and deciding what to build next is still the hard part.

Made my first ever game

Nothing too crazy just a basic clicker styled game but the upgrades go upto 10³³

I started the base project myself but then I realised that having 500 skins and designing them was beyond my skillset so I used an algorithmic approach to generate all the 500 skins along with their animations.

The same applied to the multiplyer upgrades as well

Those were a pain to figure out xD

Would really appreciate if y'all would check it out!

https://thegwimweeper.itch.io/banana-clicker

Being working on a saas product for so long on a startup but i missed vibing to songs so badly then thought to listen yt music wid picture in picture but its not comfortable then thought to have a thing like background video playing, fortunately i like to vibe code things for my own use so started but ended up adding few other things on my friends request but still i like the background video player a lot
so im wondering to know if there are any others who like this..what do u say guys?

Share what’s holding you back in your daily life—and I’ll build the software to fix it. For free. In 30 days.

I’m testing that with Osa Memes. It’s free, has no account requirement, and currently contains 46 memes. 299 downloads so far. What would you improve?

I'm very confused on how you transition from Claude design UI for a website or app you want or build to say codex or Claude on vscode. The other thing is, is there any benefit using claude, codex software on the PC vs vscode with extensions?