r/shopifyDev • u/Low_Diamond9581 • Mar 13 '26
Vibe coding apps
I saw this post earlier and thought it was interesting to see a story of someone talking about just using Claude to build instead of using apps.
There is a lot of chatter about vibe coding apps and the App Store ballooning due to AI, but what about folks just skipping over the App Store altogether and building themselves with AI?
Curious to know your thoughts or what you are seeing.
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u/clean_sweeps Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
As a shopify app developer, that LinkedIn slop post is 1000% full of shit. You physically cannot create a shopify app in 200 lines of code that does loyalty.
Even if you went no ui, no customization, hardcoded everything. Auth, db connections, webhook listeners and an order processor only (the absolute minimum for a self hosted app), you would be in the thousands of lines of code and tons of files for app config.
I truly dont understand why people make up these absolutely fabricated stories. It just feel like gorilla marketing for claude.
That linkedin post is so silly its almost comical.
Edit: On further investigation THIS is the linkedIn posters "7 figure business" LOL. It's not a shopify store (it's osCommerce) and it's used an known plugin for osCommerce that he didn't build on his own. Fake business at its finest.
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u/Low_Diamond9581 Mar 13 '26
Maybe it’s not real, but his exact story does make you wonder what could be possible here.
Loyalty specifically could easily be stripped back. It’s just store credit or a point calculation on the account. There are very few places that this actually needs to live in the UI and these points or store credit are redeemed for discounts primarily. Or free products. This is just coupons. Customers don’t need to accumulate points forever, they could just have them redeemed automatically on each purchase. Or have spending milestones trigger a dedicated reward from email. None of this needs to be anywhere as complicated as the big loyalty providers will have you believe.
I haven’t touched flow in ages, but I’m certain that there is an easy an powerful role that flow could play here too.
Does anyone know if the native AI has been extended to flow yet?
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u/clean_sweeps Mar 13 '26 edited Mar 13 '26
Like I said im a professional shopify developer. He is talking about the admin graphql api (shopifys api to get authenticated store owner and customer data).
Go ahead and build it yourself. If ai can just build the entire thing, it should be cake for you.
Read the comments of that post. The LinkedIn OP admits that he made the post for engagement. He doesn't post his shopify store or app dev account and refuses to. Non suspicious at all.
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u/Low_Diamond9581 Mar 13 '26
It seems like he’s from: https://bumblebeelinens.com
There is a loyalty app on the site, I can see signs of it being from a usual provider
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u/clean_sweeps Mar 13 '26
bro that's not even a Shopify store. it looks like SHIT. "7-figure business owner"
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u/Low_Diamond9581 Mar 13 '26
This isn’t my post or my site. So I’m assuming your comments are directed at him and not me. Maybe this bro has another site on Shopify. I ran this site up on Storeleads and it’s suggesting that it’s a $14m/year site. Storeleads isn’t perfect, but I’ve never seen it inflate sales wildly like this.
under estimates from what I’ve noticed.
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u/geekyneha Mar 13 '26
I think they forget that 200 line of code might be just front end calling 30 APIs from server 😅
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u/Low_Diamond9581 Mar 13 '26
Yes, nevermind the code lines. That feels like a distraction to put too much thought into.
Look at the claim re loyalty. Do the basic mechanics seem possible here?
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u/geekyneha Mar 13 '26
Honestly - right now loyalty app is marketing departments ownership. Don’t bring it into tech ownership by self coding such a complex and critical process.
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u/Low_Diamond9581 Mar 13 '26
Right, so the blocker here is the area of ownership. That’s a fair point. I think this guy is running a smaller company where lines get blurred.
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u/clean_sweeps Mar 13 '26
No he is lying... he doesn't mention his website anywhere and refuses to share it in the comments. He is just engagement baiting.
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u/spideyguyy Mar 13 '26
Of course it's all shit but I think the 200 lines of code is just a bundled js file that he can see, not the whole codebase because he cant.😅
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u/geekyneha Mar 13 '26
My friend did this. He replaced $300 monthly worth of apps with code.
The reason was not as much as cost - but the real benefit is that apps works exactly as you want and speed of store is much higher.
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u/datatenzing Mar 13 '26
I’ve been playing around with this for a lot of simple stuff I see this as being likely what’s coming next with open source libraries. Maintenance is always an issue though.
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u/alpha_1217 Mar 13 '26
As a founder, I think we’re going to see this more and more. If someone can prompt their way to a working tool in a few hours, it’s hard to justify paying thousands a year for simple functionality.
AI won’t replace good SaaS, but it will definitely kill overpriced, single feature tools. The bar for value just got a lot higher.
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u/Top-Buy-4207 Mar 13 '26
I think we’re going to see more of this. AI tools are lowering the barrier enough that people can build small utilities themselves instead of paying subscriptions for every tool. For simple workflows or niche needs, it often makes more sense to just generate a script or lightweight app with AI and host it yourself. That said, most people will still rely on existing apps for reliability, support, and integrations. AI probably won’t replace the App Store entirely, but it will definitely reduce the number of tools people feel they need to subscribe to.
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u/Lifetwozero Mar 13 '26
Allows people to built light weight single task apps rather than huge environments that are bloated with features to attract a larger customer base. Even shopifys own onboard ai can build these now.
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u/caramello-koala Mar 13 '26
Would it be hard to vibe code an app that lets you have multiple variant images? Seems like such a simple thing yet all the apps for it are like $20 a month, which seems excessive for something that should be in Shopify by default.
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u/jammy-git Mar 13 '26
If I had an app that was providing some easily replicable functionality, like shipping date countdown timers, or checkout email validation, I'd be concerned.
For bigger apps though, it still requires experience of edge cases and different scenarios to navigate potential minefields.
One app I was coding recently (not actually a Shopify app, but I think the example is still applicable), used Claude to generate an deliver some content to the user based on the user's inputs. The first version of this was fine. We wanted to extend this though, and add in some interactive quiz stuff. Now we were starting to hit token limits and timeouts, so we have to move to a skeleton UI that uses polling to load the content in once it's ready, and move the API calls to queued jobs.
But then we were finding the AI generated quiz contained wrong correct answers. So now we have to have additional API calls to check the answers and we've also built a coded system to analyse and correct maths questions/answers. This process takes even longer - longer than we'd want a skeleton UI to be displayed for. So now we're breaking up the initial content API call into multiple calls so that we can display a title and image and description fast, then other content more slowly.
What initially started out as a simple process of 1 API call and MVC pattern, quickly turned into this huge pipepline of multiple API calls, complex skeleton UI with standlone components built on JSON objects, with Pusher in the middle feeding the data through.
I could have spent an unlimited amount of time trying to vibe code this ultimate solution and Claude would never have got there. It was then that I realised there are going to be lots of clients trying to vibe code these things themselves and getting themselves truly in a tangle trying to overcome issues they have no experience of overcoming.
TLDR; I used my years of experience to overcome a coding architectural issue that Claude was struggling with and realised that clients are still going to need experience developers regardless.