What does ‘vibe coding’ help you ship?
Hey PH family. 🐈
Been part of this community for years now, and if there's one place to talk with builders, this is it.
So, "vibe coding"... it's absolutely everywhere right now, right? Feels like a new tool drops every week.
What does it actually do for you all? Like, in your day-to-day:
Is it best for rapid prototyping, like getting a UI idea out of your head and onto a screen in minutes?
Do you use it to build and ship actual micro-tools or landing pages that serve a real purpose?
Has it become your "code playground" for experimenting with AI APIs or new libraries stress-free?
Or is it something totally different?
Just a few of us trying to cut through the noise and understand what this trend actually means for the people building stuff.
What's your real, no-BS take on 'vibe coding'? What makes it click for you?
Replies
Product Hunt
I absolutely LOVE vibe coding and building things with AI. Here's a couple of situations where it's impacted my day-to-day or overall life.
Work: I like optimizing workflows but often times there isn't a solution to do what I know would be a quicker way. I draft up a solution. Brainstorm with @ChatGPT by OpenAI or @Claude by Anthropic and then build the solution using either @Warp or @Cursor. It allows me to improve my work, build solutions for the team, and not need to tap into engineering resources.
Learning: I need to keep up with the latest in tech and understand the different areas that are evolving. One of the ways I do this is by literally reading some docs and trying to build alongside AI. If I'm able to describe how to use and build with what's trending to AI then I'm more competent in that subject material and it makes me better at my job/personal life.
Hobby: I LOVE to make things - now with AI I spin up apps for fun. I've made one that tells me the wattage my Computer is charging at so I know if an outlet actually works or if a cable/adapter is broken. I've made a USB tethering app to help me better configure my wired tethering network. I've built multiple MCPs and automations for @Poke.com And I'm working on an iOS app now. I mostly use Cursor, Warp, and Claude Code to build these things.
I'm 0% technical :)
Dad Reply
@gabe This is what I am talking about 'spinning up" is a good way to put it. For me it's about checking if an idea is possible. I want to do X can I use Y to achieve this. What is available to me? Then if thats all good, its time to spin things up and getting going.
Also it's great to check if a joke I have just thought about has been done before.
Cal ID
Vibe coding is priceless for lowering the “startup anxiety”. It lets me go from rough idea to working prototype fast, without getting bogged down.
For me, it’s creativity without pressure. Ship first, polish later.
@sanskarix Agreed! When "vibe coding" started trending, it really reminded me of the whole "solopreneur" movement : that inspiring idea that anyone can build something meaningful, no matter where they come from.
3 years ago, I tried building an online selfie generator(called SelfieVibe). I didn’t know how to code back then, so I hired engineers to help… and honestly, the code turned out pretty messy (I never even launched it on the community ..due to the horrible user experience 😅). As someone who’s always been more of a marketer than a developer, it still took me a full month just to get that first version live.
And with how quickly models and tools are improving, I imagine products will not only get more solid technically, but building full-stack apps will become even more accessible than it is today.
It’s pretty amazing to think the same project that took me a month back then could probably be built in a day now.
That’s why I feel like what’s going to really matter moving forward isn’t just the ability to build, it’ll be:
Having thoughtful business ideas
A strong creative vision
And knowing how to connect with an audience
It’s a hopeful thought that the tools are finally catching up to the ideas.
Raycast
I’ve been vibe coding a bunch of Raycast extensions to enhance my productivity. Finally! I’m no longer the annoying user asking for features! I can build them for myself!
I vibe code often even as an iOS developer with a decade of experience. It helped speed up the production of my MVP. I just make sure to read the code before I accept the changes. The AI still makes mistakes which is where programming experience works to my advantage.
@luiscalvillo Hi Luis, great points! I'm also curious: can vibe coding tools currently handle all iOS development work end-to-end? As in, can you build a complete app and submit it to the App Store using only these tools, or do you still need traditional tools to fill in the gaps?
@nickname43 You need to have Xcode and pay for the Apple developer membership to ship the app. Yeah you can pretty much vibe code most of the app. It's a huge advantage if you already know programming cause sometimes the code it generates isn't good or has scaling issues.
Product Hunt
oh @gabe I feel you'd have some insights here!
Product Hunt
@aaronoleary Oh you bet I do. Going to comment in separate thread
I use vibe coding tools such as YouWare mostly as a Product Designer for my startup, but it is definitely not replacing engineers in my opinion. I also use it to cook up some MVPs for hackathons or user testing as well
I have shipped close to 500K lines of code, docs, content all using vibe coding. This included several reference projects on GitHub, working Chrome extensions, web apps, command line tools, multi-agent systems, and most recently a multi-platform desktop app. I practice full software engineering + product design to marketing lifecycle using same multi-agent workflow using Claude Code + custom Skills + custom tools. I am never looking at a single line of generated code ever again!
I think of it as fast prototyping without a server. By leveraging external data APIs and building things quickly, it’s great for organizing and clarifying my ideas in real time.
We just launched our first vibe coded app called Solidus on PH yesterday.
Every piece of code is written by Cursor. Infrastructure managed by GCP, and Github. We wrote complex integration between Cursor + Github. + GCP. + MongoDB. Everything connected, simple CI/CD pipeline connecting all of them together, and created an entry in the form of cursor as the only open window to code and kick start deployment.
Yes, you make a code commit. -> it gets verified -> Lint guards -> remote branch -> run automation scripts -> deployment.
We are having a lot of fun, making something and making it live. For Beta. It's that feeling of power is ultimately what drives us. And frankly I never had so much of fun or thrill in my life at doing a job.
Engineering is a beautiful thing, if done rightly.
For me it helps me to do the research, and ui/ux work that I couldn't do well before, I'm a backend dev, I find frontend dev work really confusing.
Now i just prompt to get a feature list, then generate the ux wireframe then the frontend hi def mockups and essentially iterate util I am happy then I go ahead and build it out, definitely lowered the barrier to shipping more products for me!!