A startup founder uses AI to create an MVP
to
They secure funding based on the demo
to
They find themselves unable to move beyond that initial prototype
I have trouble believing tech investors throwing money towards a founder that shows a vibe coded product without anything else. The product might be vibe coded, BUT the founder show some traction or discovered a new market or something besides a demo. It does not really matter how a founder did the MVP, they did not create google. They just showed, through the MVP, something to investors. What happens next, after money, i doubt it's vibe coded.
i have no doubt, but this has nothing to do with the MVP being vibe coded or not - this has something to do with the (technical)experience of the founder + other personality traits
I can 100% see AI worsen and accelerate that kind of things.
And I would easily argue that it's harder to copy the behavior of a good software engineer than it is to copy the moves of a good chess players.
Not even talking about understanding the business logic you are actually implementing. Which LLM seems as far as understanding chess.
I wouldnt let it do anything on larger code bases, but building highly specialized services or components IS crazy efficient, when you question ever move.
Anecdotally I’ve been using Claude to help me write a C# CLI tool from scratch. The more lines I let it write, the less and less I understand the code. Can I copy/paste it and it works? Probably 90% of the time. When I have to go and fix it, it is a huge burden.
When I prompt it to do one singular function, it’s amazing. That’s a clear and concise unit to understand.
But where real decisions need to be made by those with "skin in the game", LLMs are a disaster. Vibe coding quickly falls off a cliff. They create code architectures that no human would given the context, and as a result no human can feasibly understand or maintain them long term.
I would say this is boon to real software developers - tons of apps that need an expert to maintain, it's job security, right? Well, no. I suspect, rather than maintain these LLM-generated monstrosities, most organizations will just let them rot. That was the default in the golden age of zero-interest engineering, that's the default in the golden age of vibe coding too.
