What was the very first project you vibecoded with AI?

CCG — a GitHub Action that intercepts pull requests and uses AI to generate comprehension questions that block merging until the developer proves they understood their own code. Started as a frustration with rubber stamp reviews on AI generated PRs. Ended up filing a provisional patent on it. Repo: github.com/islandbytesio/commit_comprehension_gate

Tool: Claude. Most difficult part was prompt engineering the questions to be genuinely hard without being unfair — the model wanted to be too nice. No revenue yet but the patent is filed and a Pro tier is coming. Curious what others built.

The first product I "vibe coded" was a 100K line, DDD SaaS for PIFster, the Pay It Forward charity, which my wife and I founded and run. Donors donate as little as $1 dollar per month, then suggest and vote on charitable causes that are important to them, and the winning cause each month receives the community donation. I vibed it, but I do have a degree in CSE from 1989 and know enough coding to keep the AI within the guardrails. I also have a sweetheart deal on Gemini Pro, because of our nonprofit, so I use it as an external code reviewer and iteratively pass classes back and forth between Gemini and Windsurf (plus whatever LLM i'm using at the moment) to get the code into shape. The whole project is PHPStan L8 clean from line 1 and the frontend is fully typed using TypeScript and React 19. Build it right from the get-go was my motto. I also have maintained a dogmatic adherence to single responsibility classes, trying to keep most files under 300 lines or so. I say I vibed it, but I vibed it with standards. LOL. It has custom donations, voting, leaderboard totals, charity suggestions, referral rewards, gift cards, and more.

This won't count as vibe coding to everyone since I designed every component manually and just used AI to code.

Back in June 2025, I designed a mobile app called Spellnotes on @Figma and coded it on @bolt.new. It's a task management app inspired by character.ai. Instead of chatting with the characters, you input your task, such as "buy cheese for the BBQ" and the characters read your tasks back to you in their voices.

I only had very very limited coding knowledge before that so when I built it, I could barely understand why bugs were happening.

Did I make money off this? Hell no! I don't want to deal with what cursed things people are going to make AI characters say to them. This was also before I knew how much public backlash to consumer AI was out there.

I'm currently working on a non-AI misinformation platform Retrocodex and might make a non-AI version of Spellnotes where users can just upload photos of the character or object they want to see "delivering" their reminder without any AI modification. As useful as AI has been for software development, bringing AI personalities to the public is just too much trouble to deal with.

My first vibecoded project was TokenBar. I was paying for Claude Pro, ChatGPT Plus, Cursor, and hitting a bunch of APIs on top of that. Checked my credit card one month and realized I had spent $340 on AI tools without noticing, because each provider has its own dashboard and I never checked any of them regularly.

So I built a macOS menu bar app that shows token usage, credits, and billing across 20+ AI providers in one glanceable spot. Used Swift and Claude to build it. The hardest part was dealing with all the different API formats for usage data. Each provider returns it differently.

It is live now at tokenbar.site if anyone is curious. $5 one-time, everything runs locally on your Mac. No subscriptions, no cloud sync.

That’s a great question! For those of us who "vibe-code" daily, it’s less about the syntax and all about the momentum.

Here is my honest take:

My First Vibe-Coded Project

• The Project: A custom Chrome Extension that summarizes long technical threads into 3 bullet points using a local LLM.

• The Tools: I used Cursor paired with v0.dev for the UI components.

• The Hardest Part: Handling the "infinite loop of fixes." Sometimes the AI would fix a CSS bug but accidentally break the background script. I had to learn when to stop "vibing" and actually read the code to point the AI in the right direction.

Did I make money? Not directly from the tool, but it saved me about 2 hours of reading every week, which I traded for more freelance work.

My honest advice: Vibe-coding is a superpower, but you still need to be the "Architect." If you don't understand the logic of what you’re building, you’re just a passenger in a car with no brakes!

What’s the most complex feature you’ve managed to "vibe" into existence so far?

i used lovable to build my website. The most difficult part of the changes at that time were not very specific and precise. It seems with new AI models we have much better control over different features/functions.

Mine was Get Post AI 📱
A simple iOS app I built to generate social media posts faster.

The hardest part wasn’t coding, it was making the UX clean and the results actually useful.

Live here if curious:
https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/get-post-ai/id6474195231?l=pl

Great question! My first vibe code attempt was actually Anthos Adaptive Learning — an AI-powered homeschool curriculum platform I'm building with my wife Nicole, a certified curriculum designer.

Tool used: Claude (via Claude Code) as my primary coding agent inside of VSCode for local editing. I am also using Claude Cowork to plan out the full stack and scope out the requirements before it creates the build.md for the project.

Most difficult part: Honestly, learning that vibe coding isn't "describe it once and walk away." The real skill is learning how to communicate architecture decisions clearly enough that the AI doesn't make expensive mistakes mid-build. Writing good specs and understanding how the backend infrastructure works turned out to be more important than writing code.

Did I earn money? Launching on Product Hunt on Monday, so ask me again next week!

What surprised me most is that 20 years of IT infrastructure experience actually transferred really well. I dabbled as a script kiddie in a lot of roles for many years before AI, putting together Powershell scripts, bash scripts, etc. I didn't know React before this. Now I have a production platform running on DigitalOcean with Stripe, PostgreSQL, and a full AI content pipeline. Vibe coding is real, but it rewards people who understand systems thinking, even if they can't write syntax from scratch. That systems knowledge, living in it every day knowing how other people's software breaks, is beneficial when you start coding and your software breaks. The only difference now: I control the code and can make changes faster than any company can.

• The first thing i vibe coded was Contentify, my tool to create a Youtube video with AI

  

• What tool did you use?
  I used Claude Code, mainly using Sonnen model, sometimes i used Opus, when things were complex

• What was the most difficult part?
  I'm not sure about the other vibe coding tools out there, but with Claude Code is pretty easy. Maybe it's because i'm a developer myself and knew hot to guide it well, but I honestly can't think of getting stuck on some requirement.
  If I have to name one thing (with the version i worked of Claude at that moment), i had to be the mediator between the backend agent and the frontend agent, there was no feature that allowed you to connect the agent together. I think Claude is working on having that or released something of the kind already, not sure.

• Did you earn any money with that?
  No, not yet. It's the idea, but I have to get people to use it

At first I was very skeptical, but working with Claude Code was ideal for me.
I sound like a seller from Anthropic, but no xD.
Just to prove it... it was a bit annoying to not be able to continue working because i ran out of credits, and buying extra credits is quite expensive.

My very first "vibe-coded" project is actually the one I'm launching right now: Aegis Omni-Core.

What I built: A high-performance FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) kernel in Rust. It hits 9.4 GB/s, which sounds insane for a "vibe" project, but here's the catch.

The Tools: I used Cursor and Claude Code to help me navigate the complex world of AVX2 SIMD intrinsics and no_std constraints.

The most difficult part: Definitely the "hallucinations" on memory alignment. AI is great at writing logic, but when you're fighting for every microsecond of latency in a cryptographic loop, you can't just "vibe." I had to manually rewrite and verify every hot-path because the AI kept trying to use standard library features that don't exist in a kernel environment.

The Lesson: Vibe-coding is a superpower for prototyping the structure, but for performance-critical systems, you still need to keep your hands on the steering wheel.

Has anyone else tried to "vibe-code" something that isn't a web app? I feel like the AI struggles way more when there’s no npm install to save the day! 😂