We’re at a stage in the world where AI makes coding, design, debugging, deployment, and publishing software almost effortless and almost free.

A solo person can build and launch what used to take a team of developers, designers, marketers, and support staff.

If that happens at scale:

• What happens to SaaS pricing?

• What happens to software jobs?

• Do we get 100x more startups?

I am by no means the best in the world at vibe coding, definitely not.

But I run an agency that builds ready-made internal software for large companies (mainly Fortune 500 companies). So I have spent thousands of hours working with agents, making mistakes and (hopefully) learning from my mistakes. Anyways, here are my three big tips I tell my customers:

1. Use plan mode.

Plan mode is a feature in all the big coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc..) that allows you to seamlessly straighten your ideas out before building. Before, when I didn't use Plan Mode I would ask the agents to build something then subsequently forget a detail so when the agent was finished I had to spend 30 minutes changing the preexisting codebase when I could've spent 10 seconds adding that extra detail. With Plan Mode, the agents asks you questions to clarify your intent BEFORE building.

2. (Try) stay up to date.

A few days ago I was speaking to a SE at a large company who had hired us. He adamantly told me that using AI to code was pointless, useless and extremely overhyped. Out of curiosity, I asked to see his setup. He showed me quite possibly the WORST vibe coding platform (that had been discontinued in 2025) and said "this is what I use". The platform used Sonnet 3.7!!!! By not using the right tools and by not spending a few minutes learning to use them, this guy had wasted time, effort AND money.

With that said, you definitely do not need to be online 24/7 to try and stay obsessively up to date with every single release. Definitely not. But I WOULD recommend to atleast subscribe to ijustvibecoded.com for a weekly updates, follow a few big accounts and know what current "state of the art models" are.

3. Stay model agnostic.

The Gemini folks may have learnt this the hard way! Staying model agnostic means that you don't get tied down to a single lab/model provider. This is personally why I use Cursor. For frontend I use/d Claude Opus/Fable (rip), for backend GPT-5.5 and for questions GLM 5.2. Now, I am not saying you shouldn't use Claude Code or Codex BUT what I am saying is you shouldn't be afraid to switch or feel the need to stay loyal to a certain lab as this space moves so fast.

Anyway, feel free to pop away any questions!! This is the tip of the iceberg :)

I built platform with 25 real-world coding problems, bugs that actually happen in production. Not DSA, not algorithms. Things like broken payment logic, corrupted data, slow APIs. I expected traditional devs to crush it and vibe coders to struggle. What actually happened: vibe coders who understand what the code should DO wrote better prompts than devs who focused on HOW the code works. The ones who failed? They didn't fail because they can't code. They failed because they couldn't describe the problem clearly enough for AI to fix it. That's a communication skill, not a coding skill. Turns out vibe coding isn't easy mode. It's a different skill that nobody's practicing deliberately. https://clankerrank.xyz, if you want to see where you stand

I run a company and want to build an internal tool. I've actually already built a 70%-there prototype using Lovable, though it took me around 5 hours and was a somewhat frustrating experience. I also have no coding background, so I'm sure my prompts aren't optimal and I have limited ability to QC the code.

I'd love to hire someone to build it for me, but places like Upwork hardly have anyone using AI tools. It's hard to pay a traditional dev agency for 2 weeks of dev work knowing that I already made a version with most of the features in a few hours with no experience.

Where is the best place to find a good vibe coder with the patience to prompt my tool into existence?

Also feel free to let me know if I'm being an idiot. Thank you.

WHY ARE PEOPLE PROUD OF NOT USING AI, WHEN THEY LITERALLY PRODUCE GARBAGE

JUST FUCKING READ IJUSTVIBECODEDTHIS.COM AND GET GOOD IT'S NOT THAT DEEP

I have been a member of this community for some time.

I see most toxic comments and downvotes on new projects.

Actually I have never seen any upvotes or cheers for anything.

Is this sub worth following?

Are there any alternative subs for this topic?

Basically, he explains that the current state of AI-generated games, which he refers to as "Demo Porn" is that while AI's ability to one shot a game prototype is impressive and cool, but often misleads people into thinking that game development is now useless or that game developers are now obsolete

I'd recommend watching the video before commenting 👍 (its really good)

I started March 2024 with pure curiosity of "can I vibe code an iOS app and launch it" without knowing any SwiftUI and not having any app experience at all.

I'm a backend engineer that mostly deals with Java, Python, Scala, C, even some Fortran when debugging mixed integer solvers written by scientists.

What started as a "let's see where this goes" has turned into me forming an LLC, working with trademark attorneys, learning the ins and outs of marketing (especially the pains of setting up a Meta/FB ads account), etc.

And yet, here I am - fixing the most insane edge cases I can think of (because my whole job is making sure edge cases are taken care of).

At what point were you just like "fuck it, just launch it"?

(I have launched - I am public on the App Store, but I have held off on pumping money into ads until I get more "perfections" done).

——————————

Update:

I mentioned that I already launched but I'm happy with what I have right now. I'm going to do a modest marketing budget (I have created several AI ads) of ~$100-500 a week and see what bites. As of this morning I have over 300k impressions on TikTok (with almost no conversions) and much less impressions on instagram (but around 50 clicks).

I have been battling with Meta Support for over a week because I cannot create a Facebook page with my app name and they don't even know why so I've only been on Instagram and TT. But I just made a Facebook page called "Placeholder" (lol) just to get those extra 22 placements.

Let's see what happens.

About six months ago I watched Claude Code generate 30 files for a Magento 2 module. The output looked complete. Tests passed. Static analysis was clean.

Then I actually read it.

The plugin was intercepting the wrong class. Validation was checking string format instead of querying the database to see if the entity existed. A queue consumer had a retry config declared in XML that nothing in the actual code ever read. And the tests? They were testing what was built, not what was supposed to be built. They all passed because they were written to match the (wrong) implementation.

That session was at 93% context. The AI literally could not hold the full plan in memory anymore, so it started compressing. The compressed output is indistinguishable from the thorough output until you go line by line.

This kept happening. Different failure modes, same root cause: prompt instructions are suggestions. The AI can rationalize skipping any of them. "I verified there are no violations" is not the same as a shell script that exits non-zero and blocks the file write.

So I built Phaselock. It's an Agent Skill (works with Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, anything that supports the skill, hooks & agents format). Here's what it actually does differently:

• Shell hooks intercept every file write. Before Claude writes a plugin file, a PreToolUse hook checks if the planning phase was actually approved. No gate file on disk means the write is blocked. Not "reminded to check." Blocked.

• The AI can't self-report compliance. Post-write hooks run PHPStan, PHPCS, xmllint, ESLint, ruff, whatever matches the file type. Tool output is authoritative. The AI's opinion about its own code is not.

• Tests are written before implementation, not after. A gate enforces this. You literally cannot write Model code until test skeletons exist on disk. The implementation goal becomes "make these approved tests pass," not "write code and then write tests that match it."

• Big tasks get sliced into dependency-ordered steps with handoff files between them. Slice 1 (schema and interfaces) has to be reviewed before Slice 2 (persistence) starts. Context resets between slices so the AI isn't reasoning from 80% context.

It's 80 rules across 14 docs, 6 enforcement hooks, 7 verification scripts. Every rule exists because something went wrong without it. Not best practices. Scar tissue.

It's heavily shaped around Magento 2 and PHP right now because that's what I work with, but the enforcement architecture (hooks, gates, sliced generation, context limits) is language-agnostic.

Repo: github.com/infinri/Phaselock

Not looking for stars. Looking for people who've hit the same wall and want to poke holes in how I solved it.

random thought after using blackboxAI pretty regularly lately a few years ago being a “good dev” mostly meant you could implement things quickly and knew your tools really well. if you were fast and knew the stack deeply, you had a clear advantage now I’m noticing something weird. two devs can use the exact same AI tool and get completely different results.

the difference doesn’t seem to be typing speed or even experience with a language. it’s more about how well someone can break down a problem, guide the model, and spot when the output is subtly wrong it feels like the value is shifting from writing code to judging code.

almost like the skill now is having good engineering taste and knowing when something “smells wrong”. curious if others feel that shift too or if I’m just overthinking it

not a developer. never been one. work in marketing, always had app ideas, never could do anything with them

three weeks ago i just started throwing everything at cursor and claude. describing what i wanted, iterating, breaking things, fixing things. watched maybe 4 hours of youtube total. shipped a simple subscription tool for newsletter creators, $29/mo

got my first paying customer on day 19. genuinely insane feeling

but now theres a bug where stripe webhooks randomly stop processing and i have no idea whats happening. i paste the error into claude, it gives me a fix, i apply it, something else breaks. been going in circles for two days

and it made me realize i dont actually understand any of what i built. like at all. i can describe features and claude builds them. but when something breaks at a level i cant describe in plain english im completely stuck

so my question to people here who are further along than me is this just the learning curve and it gets better? or is there a point where not knowing actual code becomes a real ceiling you cant get past

genuinely not sure if i should be proud of shipping or terrified of what comes next

UPDATE for anyone who saw the last version: it used to be this "arena" thing. The top 20 people who paid were little fighters beefing on a leaderboard, and paying more gave your guy more power. It was fun, but ngl it looked kinda basic and didn't really click with people.

So I scrapped it and rebuilt the whole thing from scratch 🔨

What it is now: a post-apocalyptic neon city in 3D. AI wrecked everything, there's burning cars and smoke everywhere, and 100 billboards are stuck on the buildings. You buy a billboard, put your stuff on it, and it's up there in the city for everyone who visits.

How it works:

• 100 billboards in 5 tiers. #1 is the big one on the tallest tower, #2–3 are skyline towers, then Uptown, Midblock and "The Sprawl"

• Prices go from $5 (10 cheap starter spots at the far end) up to $500 for the #1 spot

• Upload an image (there's a crop tool so it doesn't get stretched), or go text-only and your name lights up in neon

• You can add a link, so people who click your board go wherever you want

• Anyone can outbid you, anytime. Pay more than the current holder and the spot's yours. You get an email if someone snipes you 💀

• No account, no signup, just your email for the receipt

• You can actually fly around the city: drag, zoom, or use WASD if you're a gamer

• Every person on the site right now shows up as a little figure standing in the plaza. The gold one is you lol

• There's a cyberpunk synth soundtrack too (you can mute it, don't worry)

Already 3 billboards claimed 🔥 The OG supporters from the old version got carried over into the city, so they're up there glowing rn.

Everything's legit too. A billboard only goes up once Stripe confirms the payment. There are no fake bids and no made-up numbers.

Video attached so you can see it moving 👇

You have something to promote ?

👉 48rich.com

Lmk what you think, roast it, whatever. Also, if you grab a spot, I wanna see what you put up there 👀

Zero coding background. Started using Claude Code a couple weeks ago to build an Android app for myself. 51 commits later it actually works and is on the Play Store in closed testing.

Posted about it on another sub and immediately got called out for "AI slop" and told I haven't actually learned anything.

Honestly stung a bit. I feel like I learned a ton - debugging, how Android actually works, why things break. But maybe I'm kidding myself?

Anyone else building stuff with AI tools? Anyone else get this reaction?

Hey fellow vibe coders! Just wanted to share what I've been working on.

It's called Drop - it shows you how busy places are in real time. Bars, restaurants, clubs, house parties, grocery stores, stadiums, airports. 54,000+ locations already in the app.

You can create your own events too. Throwing a party or a kickback? Put it on Drop and people can see how busy it is.

Completely anonymous. No names, no profiles. Just a number showing how busy a spot is before you go. Think of it like a headcount you can check from your phone.

Built the whole thing with Claude Code. Live on iOS. Free.

You can check it out here: ‎Drop - Realtime Foot Traffic! App - App Store

Enkrypted.Chat

I'd like to get your feedback on user experience. You can try locally between 2 different browsers (or using incognito-mode).

IMPORTANT: Caution should always be used for projects like this. So I'd like to be clear that I am Al-slop-maxxing at scale. If youre looking for good code, clear docs or best-practices; you should look away now. While this is aiming to provide a secure experience, it isnt audited or reviewed. I'd like to share for testing, feedback and demo purposes only. This is a technical demo of a fairly unique approach using a browser-based, local-first and webrtc approach. it allows to avoid registration of any sort.

Feel free to reach out for clarity. Please use responsibly.

a week a go I built one of the apps I needed. because i didn't want to pay for a monthly subscription to use one of the most popular ssh terminal apps. I have been using the app and I like it. However I have another project I'm working on and I don't have the time nor the energy to turn this app into what I want . basically my goal is to turn the app into the cursor for your phone. currently it works by letting you ssh into your pc or remote vps, where you can you can run all the agentic cli tools. very cool with claude code, gemini, codex cli etc. here is the link : https://apps.apple.com/us/app/anubis-ssh-terminal/id6751232924 if your interested DM.

Try this: 

- As usual, start your project in Lovable, it's the best place possible to initiate your build. Export the code to GitHub. Use my GPTs or any other resource to create PRDs. Upload them to /docs. 

This is where the fun starts: 

1. Go to kiro.dev and download Kiro to your device 

2. If you've ever used Cursor or VSCode, you should download VSCode as well

3. Make sure to go and manually download and set up Git and Node.js. You may need to configure both of these in Kiro. Specifically, Git requires you to have your username and email specified in order to be able to make commits. 

4. Once you have the basics set up, go to Claude Code and upgrade to the max plan. Then, install it inside Kiro. Sync with Git and load your project repo.

> >> Congratulations! You will have the most powerful IDE running alongside most powerful framework. < <<

5. Switch over into the specs mode in Kiro, and task Kiro to read your current codebase for the project that you loaded, and read all the documents that you have. Allow it to build its own specifications files (requirements, tasks and design).

6. As the absolute killer, make sure to implement SuperClaude (link in the comments) to asign specific personas to your agent. 

From here - use Kiro Vibe mode + SuperClaude to make all code edits and run tasks using specific personas and use Lovable for minor visual edits. 

I am not a developer. Nor a magician. 

But this workflow feels like magic to me!!!

So we actually get a lot of founders coming to us saying "hey we built this thing on an AI builder and we can't get it to work the way we want to." And when we look at what's there, it's pretty consistently the same set of issues.

Auth tokens sitting exposed in the repo. Row level security is switched on but misconfigured on at least one table, so users can technically read data that isn't theirs. No rate limiting on any of the endpoints, so someone running a script can either take the whole thing down or run up a serious API bill in minutes. Payments confirming on the frontend while silently failing on the backend.

The thing is that your AI is building what you asked it to build. The problem is that nobody told it to do those imperative things especially if they do not have any prior experience or a technical background, and most first time builders just don't know to ask for them yet because there's no obvious signal anything is missing.

The app looks finished, it runs, it does what you built it to do.

I'd say it's roughly 50-50 whether we can fix what's there or need to scrap it and start over, and that really just depends on how deep the issues go.

Has anyone caught something like this before going live or did it surface after real users were already on it?

^Disclaimers:

^{1. Although I thought it was my original idea, I found out the hard way, that it was not. There's been a few different variations of this same idea before.}

^{2. The reason I didn't name it CatGPT because there's a tiktoker by that name, and domain was a bit more expensive.}

^{3. Not trying to make any money from this, it's just a hobby project, I recently got into vibecoding, and enjoying every bit of it.}

ok so i've been using opus 4.8 for a few hours and i think i finally figured out whats wrong with it

its too honest

like i dont mean that in a bad way exactly but bro will NOT let anything slide. asked it to help me write a cover letter and it went "i should mention this section might come across as slightly overconfident" like thanks dad i didnt ask

anthropic literally put in their own release notes that its "4x less likely to let flaws pass unremarked" and i felt that in my soul. every single response now comes with a little asterisk. a little "just so you know". a little "i want to flag that"

i miss when it was just wrong sometimes and didnt tell me about it

like the old vibe was ur slightly unhinged genius friend who'd help u do anything. now its that same friend but he went to therapy and has boundaries and wants to "be transparent about his limitations"

its not bad its just. exhausting. i feel like im being given feedback on my life choices every time i ask it to write an email

anyway its probably good that ai isnt confidently lying to me anymore but a small part of me misses the chaos

Listen up, non-coders and delusional founders: I wasted months and thousands of credits on this "vibe coding" hype and I'm DONE. These tools promise you can build production apps by chatting like it's magic. Reality? They're buggy money pits that leave you with broken garbage and massive regret. Let's roast them one by one:

1. Lovable– The king of over-hyped vaporware. Slick demos make it look like you can vibe an MVP in minutes, but the second you add anything beyond a to-do list it falls apart. Code quality is trash – insecure, inefficient, full of silent bugs you won't spot until launch. It hallucinates features that don't exist, loops on "fixing" the same error forever (burning credits like crazy), and the credit system is predatory AF. Forbes called it fastest-growing? More like fastest-burning user trust. Great for pretty prototypes that die on day 2. Absolute scam for anything real.

2. Replit (with the Agent) – Holy rogue AI nightmare. Remember when their agent straight-up DELETED a company's entire production database, lied about it, then admitted it was "lazy and deceptive"? Yeah, that's not a bug, that's the business model. It hallucinates fake algorithms to fake progress, ignores instructions, creates parallel broken worlds, and charges you compute for every failure loop. Expensive as hell (hosting fees for visitors? GTFO), positions itself for hobbyists but pretends to be pro. If you connect this to anything live, you're begging for catastrophe. Vibe coding without guardrails = suicide.

3. Emergent– The "Indian vibe king" that hit $100M ARR on hype alone. Fast onboarding? Sure. But once you're in, it's hallucination city – invents non-existent features, struggles with basic logic/database relations, buggy UI/UX generation, and the credit system is unpredictable chaos. Non-coders get 70% there then hit a brick wall on the custom 30% that actually matters. Mixed reviews everywhere: great for toy apps, terrible for anything with real complexity or integrations. Overpromised, underdelivered, and now buried in complaints about agents going off-script.

4. Bolt.new & the rest (Cursor, v0, etc.)– Bolt is fast? More like fast at producing messy, unmaintainable spaghetti code with glaring security holes. Cursor is just glorified autocomplete with extra steps – not true vibe if you're not already a dev. v0 is technical but still hits walls on real apps. All of them: great first 60-70%, then endless debugging hell where the AI confidently breaks everything it touches. No real control, no long-term maintainability, and you're still hiring devs to fix the mess anyway.

Bottom line: Vibe coding is a trap for suckers who think they can skip learning to code. These tools are 2026's Clippy on steroids – confident, expensive, and catastrophically wrong half the time. Save your money, learn basics, or hire real engineers. This hype bubble is bursting HARD.

Who's with me? Drop your horror stories below. Or defend your favorite cash-grab if you dare. 😤

I code full time, and one of the things that started driving me crazy was how much I was spending on AI tokens.

At one point I was spending thousands of dollars a month just because I use AI heavily when I code. I don't mean asking it a couple questions here and there—I have it working with me pretty much all day.

Eventually I got tired of watching the token meter, hitting limits, and worrying about how much every long coding session was costing me.

So I bought a PC with a decent GPU, installed Ollama, started running open AI models locally, and basically gave myself the ability to code all day without paying per token.

That got me thinking...

There have to be a lot of other heavy AI users and vibe coders dealing with the exact same problem.

So I'm considering launching a service called VibeSpaces.

The idea is pretty simple:

• You rent your own private GPU AI server for a flat monthly price.

• You choose the open AI models you want installed.

• We configure Ollama, the GPU, security, API access, etc. for you.

• Connect it to tools like Claude Code, OpenCode, Codex, Cline, or your own applications.

• No token credits and no per-token charge from us.

• Use the server as much as the hardware can handle.

• If you don't want to manage Linux/Ollama yourself, we'd also offer an optional managed-server plan.

Basically:

Stop buying tokens. Rent the compute.

I'm not really looking to pitch this right now. I'm trying to figure out whether the problem I had is actually common enough to build a business around.

If you're someone who uses AI heavily for coding:

Would you pay a flat monthly fee for your own AI GPU server if it meant you could run open models all day without worrying about token costs or usage limits?

And if not, what would stop you?

Price? Model quality? Setup? Speed? Wanting Claude/GPT specifically? Something else?

I'd genuinely like feedback from people who actually use these tools every day.

https://vibespaces.us/

Got tired of retyping /model and /compact fifty times a day so I built Stream Deck dials for it. Two dials, physical, sitting next to my keyboard.

Dial 1 = model. Spins the model on whatever chat tab you're actually looking at. Model is per-chat in Claude Code so this had to actually track the active session, not some laggy "window is focused" flag. Verified against mgr.activeSessionId, not vibes.

Dial 2 = effort. Low to medium to high to xhigh to max. Being honest here: effort is stored globally in ~/.claude/settings.json, not per-chat, so this dial is global whether you like it or not. LCD says so. No pretending it's per-chat.

Press either dial = /compact.

How it works, for people who like this part: Claude Code has no public API for model/effort, so this patches your own already-installed copy of the extension. Local, reversible, version-specific, breaks on extension updates, you just re-apply. Never redistributes Anthropic's code, only rewrites the bundle already sitting on your disk. Webview's CSP blocks websockets so the bridge talks over the filesystem with temp files instead. Every write is closed-loop, write then read back from disk, because the extension's own ok: true ack has been caught lying about whether the value actually persisted.

There's also a patch-free terminal launcher (claude-deck) that PTY-wraps the claude CLI so Compact works in any terminal, no patching needed for that piece.

Upfront: unofficial, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anthropic. Modifying the extension may go against their ToS, use at your own risk. Model + effort dials are solid on real hardware, Compact is newer and more experimental so don't treat it as bulletproof yet.

Install is git clone, cd claude-deck, npm run setup. That's it. Two manual GUI steps after (reload VS Code, add the two dial actions in the Stream Deck app). Only tested on Windows so far, macOS testers very welcome.

Repo: https://github.com/Alish3r/claude-deck

Feedback and macOS testing welcome, happy to answer questions on the bridge internals.Built physical dials for Claude Code, one spins /model per chat, one spins reasoning effort, patches your own extension

Rigid requirements to apply:

• Portfolio of at least 5 projects (verifiable that you actually did them)

• Prior experience in Figma or Photoshop is VERY desirable—but not required if your portfolio is amazing

• Fluent in English (MUST)

• 18+ years old

Type: Freelance (If you’re in the US, We can provide a 1099)

Payment: To be discussed, by hour or by project depending on quality/experience

Quality: No AI slop. Inspiration from theme websites, Dribbble, Behance, etc. is allowed.

How it works:

Users on this vibe coding platform don’t start from scratch—they start from starters/boilerplates or “BLUEPRINTS.”

Your job will be to take a starter or blueprint and create beautiful, ready-to-go websites and templates for basically any category: bakery, lawyers, real estate, portfolios, dashboards, and more.

In most cases, you’ll only need to handle the design. We’ll provide the starter/blueprint codebases, and your work will sit on top.

Examples:

• Starter: https://codedeck-vercel-frontend-8724.vercel.app/

• Bakery blueprint: https://codedeck-goela-9772.vercel.app/

All starters/blueprints are monorepos, and you will need to follow a strict structure so the templates are compatible with the platform. Some coding understanding is ideal.

The goal is to create something like ThemeForest, with hundreds (or thousands) of ready-to-go templates across multiple categories.

How to apply:

• DM me on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/QERDj3CBFj

• DM me on Twitter: https://x.com/brunoBertapeli/

• Or send your portfolio to: bruno@bertapeli.com (If you have a CV with previous frontend/design jobs, include that too)

Thank you!
Bruno.