Comment by g947o
2 days ago
This deserves more upvotes.
Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same. Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat. What actually matters is everything else -- user experience (which requires hours of meetings and usability studies), integration with own/other people's products, business, marketing, sales etc, much of which you can't vibe code your way to success.
I'm not sure what point you're making here. Tech is rarely the moat, you even get to that point at the end of your post. The "vibe coding" advantage is faster time to market, faster iterations, etc. These things will help you get that user experience, integrations, etc.
Faster, faster, faster. All to release something that is slower, by people that now know lesser, with bloat that explodes. All for a yet another useless saas that nobody or fee people wants and a chance to virtue signaling your vibe coded product on HN. Real world successfull products are orthogonal to this approach, it doesnt work anymore in today's world
> Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same.
I think you are strawmanning what "vibe coders" do when they build stuff. It's not simple one-shot generation of eg twitter clones, it's really just iterative product development through an inconsistently capable/spotty LLM developer. It's not really that different from a product manager hiring some cheap developer and feeding them tasks/feature requests. By the way, competitors can hire those and chip away at your moat too!
> Unless you have a secret LLM or some magical prompts that make the code better/more efficient than your competitions, your vibe coded product has no advantage over competition and no moat
This is just not true, and you kind of make my point in the next sentence: many companies competitive advantages come from distribution, trust, integration, regulatory, marketing/sales, network effects. But also, vibe coding is not really about prompts so much as it is product iteration. Anybody product can be copied already, yet people still make way more new products than direct product clones anyway, because it's usually more valuable to go to market with stronger, more focused, or more specialized/differentiated software than a copy.
Friendly reminder: the comment is under a post that is hyping the capability of LLMs.
>> Even if there is a "fully vibe-coded" product that has real customers, the fact that it's vibe-coded means that others can do the same.
But that's precisely why you don't hear about these products: the creators don't disclose that they were vibe-coded, because if they do, that invites competition.
I personally know of four vibe-coded products that generate over $10k/mo. Two of them were made by one friend, one was made by another, and the last one by my cousin. None of these people are developers. But they are making real money.
We all have a cousin that makes $10k/mo and has super powers
Website roulette probably has a 50% shot at loading a blog written by a digital nomad who makes a living off some SEO side project that pays for their Asia-Pacific island lifestyle...
All pre-LLM.
You wouldn't know her, though. She lives in Canada.
My cousin definitely does not have superpowers. ;)
And I know 100 such products that are making $100k/month, do you believe me or not?
I'm afraid your numbers are not any more informative or useful than mine.