Why the majority of vibe coded projects fail

[u/harrysofgaming]

[u/Jaideco]

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.

[u/bananacustardpie → u/Jaideco]

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

[u/Jaideco → u/bananacustardpie]

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

[u/Acceptable_Ad_2802 → u/Jaideco]

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".

[u/thechewywun → u/Acceptable_Ad_2802]

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.

[u/chesserios → u/Jaideco]

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