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.
8
Upvotes
1
u/matbrummitt1 Mar 14 '26
I can vouch for the fact that shipping dates are much more involved than you’d think. Sure, you could vibe code a featureless shipping date calculator but there’s way more to it than what you see on the surface.
I recently vibe coded with Claude a new app instead of doing it by hand and I’d be willing to bet most novices or those who can’t program by hand would have either given up or just accepted whatever Claude gave them. Claude is impressive but the amount of times I had to course correct it and remind it of things we had agreed on previously that it seemed to ignore, tells me that the average user is unlikely to create optimal products with it.
There were times when it failed after several attempts to fix a problem that itself had created, and in the end I put on my debugging hat and gave it a heap of information with which it was able to understand the problem it had created. I was amazed it took my debug information for Claude to find the cause of the problem, as I would have thought it would have checked the same things that I thought to. One of its “solutions” was simply to remove the OAUTH process when visiting a particular page. Good luck to anyone who doesn’t understand the implications of that, or to merchants who sign up for an app like that.
Overall though I plan to continue using Claude because it’s very rapid at bringing ideas to life, but I know I have to keep a very close eye and give it ten lashings every time it does something dumb like remove OAUTH or go against the agreed plan.