Comment by roughly

I was talking about this the other day with someone - broadly I agree with this, they're absolutely fantastic for getting a prototype so you can play with the interactions and just have something to poke at while testing an idea. There's two problems I've found with that, though - the first is that it's already a nightmare to convince management that something that looks and acts like the thing they want isn't actually ready for production, and the vibe coded code is even less ready for production than my previous prototyping efforts.

The second is that a hand-done prototype still teaches you something about the tech stack and the implementation - yes, the primary purpose is to get it running quickly so you can feel how it works, but there's usually some learning you get on the technical side, and often I've found my prototypes inform the underlying technical direction. With vibe coded prototypes, you don't get this - not only is the code basically unusable, but you really are back to starting from scratch if you decide to move forward - you've tested the idea, but you haven't really tested the tech or design.

I still think they're useful - I'm a big proponent of "prototype early," and we've been able to throw together some surprisingly large systems almost instantly with the LLMs - but I think you've gotta shift your understanding of the process. Non-LLM prototypes tend to be around step 4 or 5 of a hypothetical 10-step production process, LLM prototypes are closer to step 2. That's fine, but you need to set expectations around how much is left to do past the prototype, because it's more than it was before.