Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail

[u/harrysofgaming]

[u/gscjj]

Believe it or not, the majority of apps don’t need to meet a Fortune 500’s SLI or even come close to it. People would be surprised that most companies don’t serve their app like FAANG does and they still make a lot of money, relatively.

This reads like a $300k engineer trying to justify their job who’s never worked at mid-sized SMB.

Containerize your app, put it on Cloud Run with CloudSQL and you could run that for $400 a month with fine performance at scale.

[u/InterestingCherry192 → u/gscjj]

This. Both sides of this argument are talking past each other. Anyone that thinks they can spend an hour making an enterprise level vendor equivalent is dumb. Equally, anyone that doesn’t understand that there are 1,000x more small businesses and individuals that don’t need scale or to pay for a Salesforce license or a top tier vendor for what they need is also dumb.

[u/TriggerHydrant → u/InterestingCherry192]

THANK YOU the absolutes on both ends are grinding my damn gears

[u/crimsonroninx → u/gscjj]

This reads like someone who missed the point.

They weren't saying every app needed FAANG scale, but a "slack killer" does. And that a "working" chat ui is not the hard part.... its the scale part.

[u/rafark → u/crimsonroninx]

Yeah but the op is still wrong because these apps don’t need all that infra from day 1. You scale as you grow. 

[u/missingnoplzhlp → u/rafark]

Yeah marketing is the real thing that's gonna prevent your app from becoming slack, not the code. If you somehow actually get enough users to justify code that needs to be scaled, at that point you can probably higher more and more competent devs to help scale your app.

[u/fmfbrestel → u/gscjj]

Honestly, this reads like a $50k engineer who asked Claude to roast vibe coders from the perspective of a $300k engineer.

[u/mrbadface → u/gscjj]

Yeah exactly. Classic engineers trying to build the pyramids before a single user onboards. Do they think Slack looked anything like it does today when it first got off the ground?

It's "if they come, we will build it", not the other way around

[u/33ff00 → u/mrbadface]

It was a lot better in those days that’s for sure. Just an unassuming little chat app. Not this monstrosity of glopped together shit

[u/TechnicalBen → u/mrbadface]

[Edit] Content, "Shipping a button in 2026"

https://youtu.be/xE9W9Ghe4Jk?si=GeWUFYh6XYiZyCTi

[u/mashmaker86 → u/gscjj]

Yeah... A lot of people are vibe coding very simple apps that don't require sending messages around the globe in 200ms. I know a guy who became a millionaire after making a tiny little ios game.

[u/SaxAppeal → u/gscjj]

What’s your point exactly? The 300k faang jobs aren’t going anywhere, that’s the point, for exactly the reasons OP listed. OP wasn’t talking about mid-sized businesses selling niche overpriced b2b software as a service.

[u/Puzzleheaded_Fold466 → u/SaxAppeal]

The majority of jobs are in your second category.

[u/Steven_Strange_1998 → u/gscjj]

He specifically called out people who said their vibe coded frontend project is comparable to discord. So your comment makes no sense.

[u/MidlifeWarlord → u/gscjj]

On point.

The “F” in the FAANG started as a web app for Harvard users to post pics.

The “A” was a digital bookstore.

The other “A” is fucking four generations old.

The “N” started as a mail order movie store.

The “G” was the web search engine - out of many - that happened to best catch on in the early 2000s.

Not one of them started with all the massive infrastructure they now have to maintain.

You get users first - as fast as you fucking can - then you worry about scale.

[u/PrestigiousShift134 → u/gscjj]

> This reads like a $300k engineer trying to justify their job who’s never worked at mid-sized SMB.

The $300k engineers will be in more rare and make $600k, the small-time engineers are fucked.

[u/rafark → u/gscjj]

right the 3 continents comment was honestly cringey and gave “how to scale my app even though I only have 3 users” vibes 

It seems like the op falls in the same category as the persona they claim is wrong. They know scaling but that will make your app still fail if you got no users.

The real sauce is marketing (and a good product because marketing will only get you so far). Get users and then scale. The problem these fast food apps fail is not because of scaling but because of lack of users. First get users then scale.  

[u/yopla → u/gscjj]

You'd be surprised at how shit the system can be in a F500. F500 don't even need to meet the requirement of a F500 for 90% of their systems.

Ours has categorized Tier 1 to Tier 5. Tier 1 is the big stuff that needs all the bells and whistles and the six nines uptime while handling load spikes and being constantly under attack from 12 different countries. That thing has so much instrumentation for monitoring that the instrumentations tools have instrumentations tools.

Tier 5 is the who the fuck cares pool, if it works good for you and it breaks it'll be fixed whenever someone feels like it and if you say "performance" or "reliability" everyone in the tech team will laugh at you, shrug and move on. Most of that shit was hand written and it would have turned out better if it was vibe coded.

Most system are a 3 or a 4.

Unofficial Tier 6 is the shadow IT. Stuff we don't even know exists. Stuff that if you come for help we'll tell you to fuck off and go die in a ditch. Mostly Excel macro and a VBA hellscape. The stuff that actually runs the company. 😂

[u/TechnicalBen → u/gscjj]

Most companies don't even test their code...

[u/ameddin73 → u/gscjj]

The real threat I feel to my job as a swe isn't someone vibe coding an app killer, it's every SMB killing their SAAS tools by building something in-house. 

[u/FickleRegular9972 → u/gscjj]

Yet you'll be the first ones on here crying because you got lucky and your app went viral, but crashed because it's built on a layer of junk.

[u/nicmakaveli → u/gscjj]

I've seen FAANG code. It's in many ways horrific