I m a product designer, and prototyping has always been part of how I explore an idea before it gets built.

But since I started using AI to build more things myself, that process has been changing.

For some ideas, I can now get to a working MVP quickly enough that building it becomes part of the exploration itself. At that point, I m not always sure a separate prototype gives me the same value it used to.

I don t think prototypes are becoming unnecessary. But I do think the point where I choose to prototype versus build is changing.

Hey everyone,

I don't come from a formal engineering background, but I've been experimenting with how far pure natural language prompting can push a functional full-stack app.

I recently shipped an interactive daily bidding leaderboard where users displace ranks dynamically, resetting every midnight UTC.

Hello everyone, Sumit here from the Himalayas. I hope everyone is having a relaxed weekend. My workflow with vibe coding has settled pretty well as I get more and more time out of desk while Claude Code builds the software.
I wanted to offer any assistance to fellow founders. I have been vibe coding full-time for a little over 4 weeks. Wrote about it here. Please share your tools, or workflow and in particular what is not working for you. What is frustrating you in building software with vibe coding?

Hey everyone!

I love the concept of "vibecoding", getting into the flow, using AI to build fast, and focusing purely on the product. But for a lot of developers (especially in emerging markets like Indonesia), that vibe instantly dies when it's time to deploy.

Suddenly, you are dealing with complex server setups, fighting DevOps configurations, or getting blocked because you don't have an international credit card to spin up a basic server.

Deployment shouldn't ruin the vibe. It should be just as seamless as writing the code.

Lately I've noticed most discussion around AI coding tools focuses on which assistant or terminal agent people use, but not much on the actual architecture decisions behind that, things like framework, hosting, database, and auth choices that affect cost and security down the line.

For context, my current default stack is Next.js on the frontend, Supabase for database and auth, Vercel for hosting, and Stripe for payments. I picked it mainly for speed of shipping and because it keeps infra costs predictable early on, but I'm not sure it's the best call for security or scaling past MVP stage.

A few things I'm curious about:

• Do you settle on a default stack before prompting your AI agent, or does the agent end up influencing your stack choice?

• What's been your biggest regret, cost, security, or scaling wise, with a stack you picked early on?

• Any stack you'd actively avoid for a new SaaS in 2026?

Over the past 24 hours, my agent IDE session has been repeatedly crashing right in the middle of writing code.

The generation will start, run for a few seconds, and then the workspace completely drops or terminates the agent process, forcing a full IDE restart just to continue.

You spend 4 hours on Cursor or v0. You prompt, the AI generates, and your app comes to life right before your eyes. It s smooth, it s thrilling. An instant hit of dopamine. You feel like a tech genius.

Then comes the time to market it.

Suddenly, you have to open Meta Ads Manager, write hooks, script a video, fight the algorithm, and potentially face total market indifference. All that high energy immediately tanks. It s slow, it s thankless, and it s uncomfortable.

The brutal truth: Vibe Coding has made building so easy and addictive that we unconsciously use it as an excuse to procrastinate on distribution. We d rather stack a 12th feature in our safe space than go out and hunt for our first paying customer.

I ve been building more with AI lately, and I ve realised I am comfortable letting it write a lot of the code, but much less comfortable letting it decide the rules the product runs on. If I already know how something should behave, I usually define that first. What inputs are valid, what should happen, what should never happen, edge cases, fallback behaviour. AI can help me build it, but I don t want an important product rule to exist only because the model happened to infer it correctly in that conversation. The line gets blurry pretty quickly though.

I am fine giving AI much more freedom with something like UI implementation. Billing feels very different. So do permissions, data deletion, security checks, or anything where one slightly different interpretation can have an actual consequence. And once you start defining enough rules yourself, I am not even sure where vibe coding ends and AI-assisted development begins.

For people shipping real products this way, what do you still let the AI decide?

And what have you decided should always be deterministic, no matter how good the model gets?

Curious what's your preference: @bolt.new @Lovable @Replit @v0 by Vercel? or else?

For Valentine's day I used @Replit to make an app (PWA) that lets me and my partner "hug" via notifications, and has an exploding heart when we're both touching a button at the same time.

What I'm stoked on:
I was able to get a prototype in minutes even though it had a lot of flaws. It took me a couple of sessions over a few days to build an app that kind of works. This was pretty mind-blowing, as my coding ability is fairly rudimentary (background in data science and I've done some basic javascript but never built a standalone app).
Using @Wispr Flow sped things up and also was impressive - It's cool to see the little touches that Wispr has implemented to improve dictation, and I'm just impressed by the speed and fluidity of using it on desktop. As a side note, using Wispr has made me increasingly frustrated at how poor iOS's built-in voice dictation is.
What I'm frustrated by:
I had to restart building the app a couple times because when I would try to get it to fix certain things, it would create more problems. It felt like working with a very fast but extremely inexperienced developer who has no sense of when they're off on a dead-end in the maze.
I haven't developed an intuition on when to use agent and when to use assistant. Replit shows how the agent is more expensive than the assistant, which stressed me out a bit. Although I realized I never hit the threshold where it started charging me more than my normal subscription. So I think it was just a psychological thing.
It had repeated errors around web socket connections and dealing with notifications on iOS. I had to get deeper and deeper into these myself, and in one case, teach it how to do notifications properly on iOS. It turned out that Replit's information was outdated, and it thought that it is not possible to do native notifications with a PWA on iOS. So I had to actually get code from ChatGPT to teach it.
It was stressful to make a change knowing that I could break and was likely to break many other things, and I didn't know how to properly create a checkpoint that I could fall back to. It creates checkpoints all the time, but I couldn't figure out how to name a checkpoint or save it in a way that was easily recoverable.
Because it takes some time for Replit to compile, I've found myself doing other things like work, little tasks, or even watching a TV show while waiting for Replit. But then I had to keep checking because it wouldn't send me a notification. I wonder if there's a way to send notifications?
Help me make my workflow better! What am I doing wrong / what could I be doing that I'm not doing?