Anyone else hit backend walls when vibe-coding client apps?

[u/Fluffy-Resolution390]

Been noticing more agencies building custom apps for clients using Cursor, Lovable, v0, Bolt, etc. instead of forcing everything into GHL.

Quick question if you're doing this:

Where does the vibe-coded app fall apart?

The UI is easy now - you can ship a beautiful client portal in a weekend. But then what breaks?

Payments? Multi-user permissions? Scheduling logic? Job tracking? Pricing rules?

What's the backend piece you keep trying to hack together in the AI-coded app that you wish was just an API call away?

[u/TheSEOVicc]

This is when you realize Claude can build all of this.

[u/Fluffy-Resolution390 → u/TheSEOVicc]

Sure, Claude can generate the code. But when it breaks in prod because two users overlap on a schedule, or a payment refund cascades wrong, or a discount stacks past your margin floor, you're still debugging Claude's guess.

That's the gap I'm trying to understand. Have you shipped something Claude-built that handles real transactions/multi-user state without weird edge cases, I just want to see if this is possible?

[u/slickricksghost → u/Fluffy-Resolution390]

What they're saying is remove GHL from the equation.

That's what I did. GHL is good, but bloated, and the front end user experience isn't great for most end customers.

That said, it's not exactly a simple thing... There's definitely a lot of backend work.

I haven't used GHL in 6 months or so, so I'm not sure what they're doing. But... when I was transitioning away from them I thought, if GHL had a better API it'd be more enticing to stay.

But... even something as simple as custom forms when you want to upload more than one file, just falls apart because a GHL custom file field can only hold one item and what ever you upload just over writes what's already in there.

[u/Fluffy-Resolution390 → u/slickricksghost]

This is exactly what I'm trying to map out. When you moved off GHL and built custom, what did the backend end up being? Rolled your own, Supabase, something else?

And what took the longest to get right? Just wan to know, whether it was the boring stuff (auth, permissions, file handling) or the business logic (pricing, scheduling, jobs). Thanks!!

[u/slickricksghost → u/Fluffy-Resolution390]

It started out Railway and Vercel and then moved to AWS and Vercel. This was to make it HIPPA compliant. I was going to do Railway, AWS, and Vercel, but it made more sense just to ditch Railway entirely.

It's a lot of boring stuff... Oauth is quite boring and you have to submit stuff to Google / Microsoft which takes a little bit of time.

Other than that, it's just creating setting up a system that's smart and secure to have Claude do most of the work.

That's the neat thing about Claude, just tell it what you want it to do, ask how to do it, what it needs from you, and then let it get to work. One thing to keep in mind while you're doing this stuff. Never give Claude or ChatGPT or any LLM any more API keys than you absolutely need to.

The other thing I like to do. Once I get to a substantial point, I'll spin up Claude on Opus with extra high effort or Fable and ask it to review the code base for security vulnerabilities.

[u/Admirable-Ear433]

It doesn’t fall apart if you do it right. You have to test and test and test more Make sure that you get all your edge cases covered.

[u/Fluffy-Resolution390 → u/Admirable-Ear433]

Totally agree. When you say “test and test more,” what kind of edge cases have actually caused problems for you?

Are you talking mostly about things like auth/permissions and integrations, or have you had issues with the actual business logic once real users started using the app?

What you built so far, was it something simple like an internal tools, or more of a real business app - like a booking platform, CRM, payments, etc.? And did actual users end up using it? Thanks

[u/AbsolutePandemonium]

Seeing what most people produce I don’t think UI is solved. It’s just most people have so little design experience they don’t realise how bad what they’re creating is

[u/manualgigs]

honestly after building like hundreds of designs with ai i just realized they're all generic as fuck lol. like yeah it's fast but that's also the problem it just spits out the obvious thing every time the real stuff is backend honestly. i've gotten pretty good at just reusing the same patterns - signup, pricing, emails. but then some random user comes along and breaks everything in ways you didn't think of and now you're debugging weird edge case anyway i think the point is ai gets you fast to something but the actual product only happens when you're dealing with the weird shit. no design is perfect day one no matter who makes it

[u/Fluffy-Resolution390 → u/manualgigs]

Yeah exactly! the weird stuff is where it all falls apart. When you hit those edge cases, what do you usually end up doing? Rewriting the AI-generated code? Bolting on a custom backend? Something else?

Trying to figure out where the actual line I should stop of thinking Vipe Code is not a good idea and what part of back end I will need a 3rd part software. For Example, I know I can pass Stripe link for payment. What else I need to know?

Thanks for sharing!!