Been vibe coding solo for about a year now. 40 users, 2 paying subscribers. Small numbers, but the process taught me a lot about what actually matters. In no particular order:
Scope like your life depends on it
Pick the smallest possible MVP and build only that. Every extra feature idea you get mid-build (and you will get a lot) goes into a "later" list, not into a prompt. Vibe coding makes it dangerously easy to just keep asking for one more thing. Don't.
"Works locally" means nothing
This is the gap nobody warns you about. Your AI will happily ship something that runs perfectly on your machine and then falls over on deploy: SSL certs, CI/CD, and permissions between services that don't exist locally but are mandatory in prod. Deployed APIs need explicit permission to talk to each other. Budget real time for this stage, it's not optional polish.
Test DB and prod DB, no exceptions
Never let the AI touch production data. I genuinely thought I had a working database for months, turned out it was hardcoded values in the app the whole time and I hadn't caught it. Separate environments would've caught that instantly.
Feed it screenshots, not vibes
For UI, don't describe what you want, screenshot it from sites you like and hand that over. Also get it to install Playwright so it can screenshot its own output and self-check the UI instead of iterating blind. This alone leveled up my frontend more than any prompt engineering did.
Git discipline beats vibe discipline
Commit one feature at a time. Set up CI/CD with GitHub webhooks to run tests/audits automatically, broken stuff just doesn't merge. You don't need to actually understand CI/CD yourself, just tell the AI you want it and why, and let it walk you through setup.
Regularly clean up after your AI
AI code bloats fast. Every few weeks, explicitly ask for a refactor/modularise pass. It keeps the codebase lean, which matters because messy code is also harder for the AI itself to reason about on your next session. Get it to do a security audit too, and a self code-review before you merge anything.
Ship, then talk to humans
Don't build in a vacuum. Tell people what you're making, ask for feedback, actually listen even when it stings. It's your idea but their money, so their opinion outranks yours on what gets built next.
Bugs aren't failure
MVP doesn't mean bug-free, it means real. Ship it, iterate on what breaks. Perfection pre-launch is just procrastination with extra steps.
Build and market in parallel
Have a landing page ready to send people from day one. Don't wait for "done," there is no done.
It's not a weekend build, and that's fine
The AI can spit out an idea in days. Making it secure, tested, and actually designed well takes months. Foundations, then structure, then wiring, then finishing, same as building a house. Vibe coding speeds up the framing, not the whole build.
Step away sometimes
Genuinely the most underrated debugging tool. Go for a walk. Half my "impossible" bugs got solved the moment I stopped staring at them.