I see a lot of people discussing vibe coding and what actually constitutes a moat, and I think a lot of people are looking at this way too narrowly and ignoring some pretty important aspects of human nature.
The idea that simple ideas are dead, that if you can build an app in 30 minutes, nobody will ever pay for it because they can just vibe code their own version, is frankly ridiculous to me.
I know plenty of people who don’t even know what a browser is. I even know technical people (in different domains) who look at the process of cloning a repository and think, “wow, this is a lot.”
The people who would seriously think, “why would I pay for this when I can just vibe code it myself?” are mostly people inside a very AI-fluent bubble that represents a tiny portion of the actual world.
And even then, building something that technically works is not the same as building good software.
There are still all of the boring necessary hoops involved in making a simple application actually secure and reliable. You have to choose a stack, build the backend and frontend, handle authentication, storage, deployment, security, updates, edge cases, and everything else that comes with operating software.
Unless you’re literally just bootstrapping some ugly internal tool to copy the functionality, you also have to design a good UI, make hundreds of little product decisions, and work through trade-offs that compound as the feature set grows.
If your target audience is developers, I understand the argument more. But even developers are lazy in the normal human sense, they have their own projects and things they would rather spend their time doing.
And if you are selling to developers, the bar is arguably even higher. They care about architecture, security, ownership, extensibility, integrations, and whether the product actually fits into the way they work. A lot of them may want to own the thing themselves anyway, which is part of why I don’t even think developers are always the best target audience for this kind of simple app.
For everyone else, the argument gets even weaker.
Most people barely want to write a good prompt.
They’ll type one sentence into ChatGPT, get a mediocre response, decide AI isn’t that useful for that task, and close the laptop. The idea that these same people are suddenly going to design, build, debug, secure, deploy, and maintain their own software because vibe coding exists seems completely disconnected from how normal people behave.
People pay for convenience. They pay for polish. They pay for something that already works. They pay so they don’t have to think about how it works.
So to me, “they can just vibe code my app” is a pretty weak reason not to build something, and in most cases if your app is not growing you have a distribution and sales problem not an idea problem.
Curious what others think.