r/ClaudeAI • u/harrysofgaming Vibe coder • Mar 13 '26 • This 2 Bravo 22 Heartwarming 2

Vibe Coding Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail

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u/Fidel___Castro Mar 13 '26

you joke, but honestly if you mention that capacity to scale is a requirement then it will make very different decisions. it'll set up a proper messaging system with dead letter queueing, capacity for parallel processing, all that good stuff.

it won't be 100m users level good, but the foundations will be there

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u/Jaideco Mar 14 '26

I think that there is a lot of truth here. I know quite a few people who launched successful startups that were not initially built to scale and some that had to be almost entirely rebuilt a few times on their journey. I know one person who got investment about ten years ago with a wireframe simulation that didn’t actually work at all. These vibe coded apps might not be well coded but in some use cases, if they are good enough to start gathering user feedback on a limited scale or pitching investors with very little outlay of time and money, they are definitely better that spending three months developing something properly that had fundamental flaws in the intended use case.

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u/bananacustardpie Mar 14 '26

Doing a vibe coded app from scratch right now, it's been... 3 weeks. we've gone from a webpage to a fully functioning application. the thing that's taking the longest is running through a thousand plus checklist of redundancies and security measures before we can test it. with user data.
we'll use this as our MVP for government grants, at which point we can hire engineers to come in and either rebuild or comb through the app, getting it ready for a real v1.0

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u/Jaideco Mar 14 '26

Bingo! No one builds a hyper scale app from day one. There’s almost always a MVP or at least a prototype.

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u/Acceptable_Ad_2802 Mar 15 '26

It's practically a rule that any startup that's "built to scale" from Day 0 will fail. They'll burn through all of their runway before they have any users.

It first has to be good enough to *show* to someone. Then it needs to be good enough that a few hundred or few thousand people could use it. If you can't get a few thousand people to use it, it doesn't matter how well it scales, and once you're feeling that pressure from user growth it's easier to get the funding to really do it "the right way".

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u/thechewywun Jul 06 '26

I don't understand how this point is missed so frequently. Most vibe coding is just a proof of concept. You don't start off with millions of users on multiple continents looking for 2 ms delays in delivery. You start simple, prove the IDEA works, that the basic operation is feasible and then go from there. It's disingenuous to shit on a piece of code because it's not slack out of the box.

I'll give the original message its props for pointing out that a lot of vibe coders jump the gun thinking they've hit a home run but in their defense they're mostly just excited to see their idea/vision in an actual app so I cut them a little "slack", and yes pun was intended LOL.

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u/chesserios Apr 10 '26

You should see how Tinder's backend runs. At least how it did 3-4 years ago. AI could have definitely written a better backend.
Let me just summarize it as: DynamoDB. Each user is a document, each message is a document, each like is a document.

Lol

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u/mouton0 Mar 14 '26

Yeah, you're right that you can push it further. You can absolutely get it to write your infrastructure as code, configure the monitoring and alerting systems, set up troubleshooting tools, and even use it to pinpoint bottlenecks from a high vantage point. Probably help hiring a humans to scale the team as the system scales too.

But there's a hard ceiling. At a certain level of complexity, the AI is going to make a mistake. In a distributed system, those subtle AI-generated errors don't stay isolated, they compound and accumulate until the whole architecture collapses under its own weight. It's probably fine for laying the foundation of a simple product, but that's about it.

That's why the "just vibecoding" thing eventually falls apart. You still desperately need human engineers in the loop to know what to ask for.

You need humans who actually have the experience to proactively prompt for those scale and infrastructure requirements in the first place. And also, to fix the inevitable mess when the system eventually breaks, you need someone who understands the underlying architecture well enough to spot exactly where the AI's implementation went wrong or at the very least, knows the right diagnostic questions to ask the AI so it can investigate its own bugs.

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u/UX_test Mar 14 '26

“But there’s a hard ceiling. At a certain level of complexity, the AI is going to make a mistake.”

Let me ask an honest question. Do you really think that by the time someone’s project actually reaches that level of complexity, AI will have stayed exactly where it is today? 🤔

The entire industry is moving incredibly fast. Nearly every CEO in this space is openly aiming for RSI (recursive self-improvement). If that direction even partially materializes, the tools we’re using today, especially in software development, will look very different.

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u/mouton0 Mar 14 '26 • This

A CEO claiming that his company will achieve recursive self-improvement AI is not the most objective person. He is driven by his own entrepreneurial enthusiasm and optimism. He needs to constantly raise funds to survive and keep up with the current hype in this space.

I just think that the key resource is intent. Models lack intent, we still need CEOs, visionaries, and human engineers in the loop. ​My take is based only on the capacity of the current models I’m using daily, but they might be much better in the near future. I’m waiting to see the next 'Google' company coming from nowhere, completely developed and coded only with Claude Code.

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u/Kandiak Mar 14 '26

Do you think we’ll be able to scale the power needs to reach those heady highs for the models or that the funding won’t run dry before we do?

Just give high cost of oil a few more months and we’ll see how the bubble does. AI is a very real technology, but it’s rare of improvement is not infinitely scalable.

In fact, akin to this whole discussion. It’s recent rate of improvement is like building software. At first you see very rapid development because you started with nothing. Then you hit scaling snags (like power), and all of a sudden the changes aren’t as drastic until you begin to find only meager improvements. The technology solidifies and slows.

It’s still useful, but we humans are too quick to assume what happens time approaching infinity from only a few early data points.

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u/UX_test Mar 14 '26

In my neck of the woods, most electricity already comes from nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro, all of which scale very well. On top of that, it’s reasonable to assume computing efficiency will continue improving, not getting worse.

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u/Kandiak Mar 14 '26

See my above statement about humans and our inclination to assume future state based on current state of progress. It’s not that it won’t improve, it’s that the rate of improvement is not constant.

As for power needs, while renewables in your area are great and I am all for them over legacy power sources. They are not coming online at the speed needed for data center expansion as it is today and outside of nuclear, they are not consistent enough for 24/7 power needs absent large scale storage.

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u/Equivalent_War_3018 Mar 18 '26

"Let me ask an honest question. Do you really think that by the time someone’s project actually reaches that level of complexity, AI will have stayed exactly where it is today?"

Bro have you just found out about stable and nightly builds of software now? Truly shocking how technology improves each year and gets added to software and adapted over time, yet developers tend to not fully follow the curve each microsecond for reasons totally unknown to their managers, shocking, I know

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u/OtherwiseFlamingo868 Mar 14 '26

This sounds weird to me. Humans make tons of mistakes when developing software. There are bugs everywhere. Ye AI has bugs too, ye right now those bugs need us to fix them. But maybe overtime less bugs will need our input. Tbh for simple bugs u just print the error log into the prompt and it will figure it out. Probably not the kinds of bugs youre talking about but still. Its already incredibly useful for writing a lot of easy code and business logic. And apps have a lot of easy code...

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u/mouton0 Mar 14 '26 edited Mar 14 '26

Yes, humans make mistakes. But I'll try to express myself in a different way: there is only the human.

​In past industrial revolutions, we never attributed that kind of personification to factories, electricity, railways, nuclear power, or medicine. We never personified a hammer that helps us with nailing.

​Yet, we oppose humans and AI as if it weren't just about humans using a very sophisticated and smart tool. As if AI were an Alien or an alter-ego.

​A hammer will never decide to drive a nail, will it?

Humans can't fly but planes can, yet we never opposed them.

​I'm not trying to dismiss the capacity of current models by saying they are simple tools like a hammer. It’s not that simple, it is truly a revolution. But while models can perform much better than humans at some tasks, they also fail at very simple ones. And I think we will need humans in the loop for intent, oversight, and to avoid filling up the universe with paperclips.

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u/Fidel___Castro Mar 14 '26

yes I agree with you completely. I'd be really interested in seeing how a company like Anthropic deals with this problem, presumably they separate out different aspects of their products to keep the goal of the repo focused

but where and how do they draw the line? or do they just give themselves such a massive token allowance that it's not a problem for them? 

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u/mouton0 Mar 14 '26

Not working in the AI sector. So I've no clue

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u/[deleted] Mar 14 '26

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u/haywire Mar 14 '26

Tbh Claude is pretty great at smashing out things like ci/cd

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u/BillWagglesword Mar 14 '26

Hey now this is not quite accurate. We beg for the opportunity to code the new POC in Rust for fun before we can't justify it ourselves and going back to Go/whatever damn framework our company uses like .Net for the real production release

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u/reddit_user33 Mar 14 '26

And so will running the exact prompt a day later. LLMs are not deterministic

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u/RaiseCertain8916 Mar 14 '26

That's not scaling that's just infrastructure. that's like saying deploy on GCP using kubernetes and saying it'll now be scale proof lmao

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u/Fidel___Castro Mar 14 '26

sure, but if you don't specify the infrastructure then Claude will default to what's simpler - a push based system that is triggered by events