The thing nobody tells you about vibecoding: shipping fast is easy, knowing what to keep is hard
A few months ago I made a small bet with myself: build and ship a tiny tool in one weekend, no overthinking, just vibes. I did it. It worked. People used it. And then something strange happened.
The weekend project taught me more about my own habits than any "proper" project ever had.
When you can spin up a working app in an afternoon, the bottleneck stops being can I build this and quietly becomes should I, and which 5% of this actually deserves real care. I caught myself lovingly engineering parts no user will ever notice, while rushing the one flow that actually mattered.
So I've started thinking about vibecoding less as a speed tool and more as a taste filter. The AI handles the typing. The judgment about what to keep, what to throw away, and what to quietly rebuild later is still very much on me.
I'd genuinely love to hear how others approach this:
When you vibecode something, what's the one part you always slow down and do carefully by hand?
Have you ever shipped something fast and been surprised by what users actually cared about (vs what you obsessed over)?
Is there a project you vibecoded that you'd build completely differently if you started today?
Curious whether the rest of you feel this shift too, or if I'm just overthinking a weekend hack. What's your take?
Replies
This hits hard. I've been vibecoding a bunch lately and realized I still instinctively over-engineer the "smart" parts no one sees, while rushing the actual core experience that matters. One tiny tool I shipped fast surprised me because users loved a dumb little copy-paste feature I added in 10 minutes, not the fancy logic I spent hours perfecting. Now I try to force myself to nail the main user flow first before touching anything else. Curious, what's the one thing you always end up slowing down for when you're in vibe mode?
@roniardynt The dumb copy-paste feature winning over the fancy logic is the perfect example of this. Users care about what saves them friction, not how clever the code is. Nailing the main flow first is such a good rule. For me it's always the onboarding/empty state, that's where people decide if they'll stick around.
Great framing.
One thing I'd add: the taste filter only works if you've shipped enough bad versions to know what bad feels like. Early on I had no filter, so I treated everything as equally important and burned out polishing the wrong 95%. The judgment you're describing feels less like a skill you start with and more like scar tissue from things that flopped. So maybe vibecoding fast is actually how you build the taste, by failing cheaply and often.
Do you think your filter would be this sharp without the weekend projects that didn't work out?
@builder_eden "Taste as scar tissue" is a great way to put it. Honestly no, my filter wouldn't be half as sharp without the stuff that flopped. The cheap failures are what taught me where to actually spend the care. Polishing the wrong 95% is a rite of passage I think most of us go through.
Someone I know was experimenting with fast AI built projects and faced the same issue. They could launch quickly but deciding what to continue was the difficult part.
@tumblar_kevin So true. Launching is the easy part now, deciding what's worth keeping is the real skill. Did your friend figure out a way to make those calls, or still mostly gut feel?