I tried to vibe-code my way to a SaaS… and failed
Last summer, the idea for my SaaS, Xolora, started to take shape. Around the same time, the concept of vibe coding was blowing up. As a non-technical founder, it sounded like a dream come true. No coding experience? No problem, just let AI handle it.
The beginning was incredibly promising. Using Emergent made me feel unstoppable. I was seeing my idea come to life.
But then, reality hit.
The moment the architecture required deeper complexity the magic completely faded. I stopped building and started drowning. I spent days stuck in endless debugging loops, trying to explain to an AI errors that I didn’t even understand myself. I was burning precious time, and honestly, the Vercel deployments and GitHub conflicts became a nightmare. The vibe-coded version was far from a real, stable product. In fact, it was embarrassing.
It was a tough pill to swallow, but it made me realize that AI is a powerful assistant, but it doesn’t replace structural software engineering when you're building a scalable product.
Instead of giving up, I decided to pivot my approach. I teamed up with a professional developer. Now, we are rebuilding Xolora properly to actually deliver the value that solopreneurs and small business owners need, without the fragile vibe-code foundation.
For the other non-technical founders here: Have you managed to launch a complex SaaS purely on vibe-coding, or did you hit the same wall? At what point did AI stop being enough for you?
Replies
Wow, thank you for sharing this experience! And loved that you pivoted and it was a happy ending post.
@heyitsirenechan Thank you! I'm also glad I pivoted. :)
I think there’s some framing that’s needed here. If you started your project 6 months ago that’s very different from the model/orchestration/tool landscape of 2 months ago. So 6 months ago that wall would have been much harder to “scale” 🤷♂️🤣
Another fundamental paradox is that agentic infra development is changing so quickly that it’s potentially advantageous to iterate on architecture, “ontology”, schema, and more abstract aspects than go straight to coding, ie it might be better to delay some key decisions than to rush into building. This can set you up to spend less time chasing your tail. For example, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about observability and governance tools and that landscape is pretty immature relative to what agents can do. So achieving “scale” depends on exactly what you’re doing. That thing that saves you a month of work might release next month so the entire month you spent sorting out problem X might have been better spent on Y etc. Architecture work and development roadmap refinement can result in serendipitous delays, dead ends that save you from coding useless components, endless debugging loops, etc. Maybe the problem you’re trying to solve improves with the next model upgrade. Maybe you needed to switch models or orchestration platforms. Developers won’t magically know how this looks.
You could need a team of engineers to deploy something “at scale” but depending on who you talk to and their particular expertise you’re going to get varying opinions so it’s still valuable to research with AI and constantly seek more information. I wouldn’t be so quick to defer to a developer as a default solution that can solve all of your problems as complex tools usually require teams, and a single developer isn’t a silver bullet. Learning to use agents with access to calling tools like Jira/ClickUp and GitHub/Bitbucket has been huge for me. I’ve also added Slack to my workflow and these are all necessary prerequisites to managing complex tasks between people and AI.
@powderpc I started almost one year ago with vibe-coding. And it really is not for me. Even if it progressed a lot. I'd rather spend my energy on other things. Also my dev has a team he's working with. And so far the app looks much better than any vibe-coded version I could have come up with. Because he knows what to include and I don't.
This may be a stupid question, but what exactly is vibe coding?
@withmarlowe When AI writes the code for you. You prompt it to build an app.
Not to discredit your experience, what you hit is real, and a lot of non-technical founders run into it. But I'm a non-technical founder, and I think the tool you used was wrong for the complex application you were trying to build. I used Replit Agent to vibe-code my product (ARKLIS: An AI CFO for SMBs) over the last 8 months, but the unlock wasn't the coding tool itself. It was using Claude alongside it to engineer the prompts I was feeding in. Plain-English idea → Claude turns it into a precise, structured prompt → Replit builds it without spiraling. That second layer saved me from the debugging loops you described, even when the architecture got genuinely complex. The takeaway being in the age of AI, the better prompter will become KING!!
@tryarklis But I also used Claude and still hit endless debugging loops. I agree that the prompts matter a lot, but I trust a professional developer more than an AI generated app. And so far I've never heard of anyone who vibe-coded a complex SaaS that was scalable and GDPR compliant without the eyes of a dev.
Thank you so much for sharing this. I had big ambitions while building Good Husband as well, but the reality was that I had to scale things down and launch in stages in order to execute sustainably.
@zainab_imichi_alhassan_alli Thanks for sharing your experience! Yes, scaling things down is usually the more sustainable way for a truly successful software.
I'm not a developer by training, although I have some development knowledge. However, I founded a company in 2014 and hired several developers to create a solution that's still on the market (even though it has evolved, of course). This experience taught me that software isn't just what you see. Business rules, data volume, and consequently, architecture are of paramount importance.
Since then, I've developed a new solution, 100% using Vibe coding, which I developed entirely on my own. We'll be deploying it for two major clients in September.
To avoid taking risks with the architecture, here's the method I used.
To begin, I used the BMAD method, which, while time-consuming in terms of responses and interaction with an AI, allows you to ask the right questions and define the right direction and architecture.
Then, I coded with Claude Opus and, at regular intervals, had the generated code audited by another AI. I started with Gemini and now I'm doing this with GPT5.5.
So, BMAD is my architect, Claude my developer, and GPT5.5 my QA, and so far, it's working.
If this can help, feel free to contact me. I'll be happy to answer any questions.