Vibe coding isn't dead
For a while, vibe coding was sold as the future of programming.
You have an idea, explain it to AI in natural language as though talking to a person, and build software without knowing how to code.
The promise was almost too good. You no longer needed to learn programming. You no longer needed a technical cofounder. You just needed an idea.
You opened Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, Lovable, or a similar tool, described what you wanted to build, and AI did the rest.
Finally! People said the time had come for those with ideas but no coding skills. People with vision. People who didn't want to waste time learning boring technical skills. People who always said, “I have an idea for an app.”
For a few months, it felt real.
Thousands of people started building products. Dashboards, trackers, habit apps, personal CRMs, productivity tools, journaling apps, AI wrappers, colorful to-do lists, landing pages, micro-SaaS products, extensions, automations.
The feed filled with wild claims.
“I built this in four hours.” “I built this over the weekend.” “Solo founder. No code. AI did 90%.”
Yes, it's impressive. But here's the part almost nobody tells you:
Being able to build an app doesn't mean you can create a successful product.
The difference is enormous. And that's exactly where the vibe-coding fantasy collides with reality.
The graveyard of almost-finished apps
Vibe coding's first problem isn't technical. It's psychological.
AI makes starting too easy. When starting becomes too easy, people start too many things.
I've seen this pattern repeat again and again. Someone has an idea. Builds it over a weekend. The app starts looking good. A few buttons. An interface decent enough for a screenshot and a post.
Then comes the dopamine hit. They feel they've built something. They feel progress. They feel they're finally close.
But the product doesn't really exist yet.
What's missing is the part you don't see in the screenshot: finishing it, testing it, fixing bugs, making it usable, finding users, charging money, providing support, and discovering whether anyone actually wants it.
That's where the project starts dying. Not because AI fails. Because the initial excitement fades.
Then another idea appears. Newer. More exciting. Easier to imagine than to finish.
Another prompt. Another app. Another domain. Another project that feels easy to execute because it hasn't reached the hard part yet.
That's how the graveyard of almost-finished apps is born. Projects that are 70%, 80%, or 90% complete.
“Almost ready.”
But “almost” is where most products die.
Fake productivity feels too good
Here's something I think many people don't want to admit: vibe coding can feel productive even when you aren't producing anything useful.
AI writes code. New files appear. Bugs get fixed. You ask for more changes. You feel like you're working.
Technically, you are. But not all movement is progress.
You can spend weeks fixing an app nobody will use. Spend $100 or $200 a month on AI tools, burn hours every night, and feel like you're creating the future.
But if nobody uses it and nobody will pay for it, you aren't building a product. You're accumulating fake progress.
And it's dangerously addictive. Every session gives you small rewards: a problem solved, a working button, another thing to fix.
Those rewards don't necessarily translate into users, revenue, or real learning. That's the danger.
AI didn't just lower the barrier to creating. It also lowered the barrier to fooling yourself.
Before, the technical difficulty of building an app forced you to think more before starting. Now you can skip that step.
That's incredible, but also dangerous. You can invest weeks in something without answering the most important question:
Will anyone actually use this?
The second blow comes when you actually finish the app
There's another version of the problem.
Suppose you finish the app. You launch it. Publish the link. Post on Instagram or LinkedIn. Send it to your friends. Sit back and wait.
Nothing happens.
Three likes. Congratulations from someone who won't use it. A “looks cool” comment.
Zero real users. Zero payments. Zero signs the world was waiting for what you built.
That hurts more because you can't hide behind “I'm still building” anymore.
The app exists. The market had a chance to respond. Its answer was silence.
Many interpret that silence as a marketing problem. Sometimes it is.
Sometimes you don't know how to distribute it. Tell the story. Show why it matters. You don't have an audience, trust, or a channel to put the product in front of the right people.
But often the problem is deeper: there wasn't a strong enough reason for the app to exist.
The idea sounded interesting in your head. Looked good in a screenshot. Was fun to build. But it didn't solve a pain or problem urgent enough for someone to pull out their card and pay.
That's a difference many people don't understand. Not every problem deserves a product. Not every interesting idea deserves to become an app.
This is what the vibe-coding hype didn't tell you. AI can help you create faster. Write code. But building something people actually want remains just as hard.
The advantage is knowing what to build
An app isn't a product just because it works.
For years, code was the barrier. It seemed logical that removing that barrier with AI would let everyone build successful apps.
But code was only one barrier. It wasn't the only one. Often, it wasn't even the most important.
The real barrier was understanding a problem well enough to create something someone wanted in their life or business.
When AI lets everyone build similar products, the real advantage stops being in the app. It moves to a validated idea. Distribution. Understanding the user better. Knowing why someone should choose you over ten other tools that look as good or better and promise the same thing.
When everyone can build, what really matters is who knows how to distribute.
Building for yourself can work
There's an interesting exception: building tools for yourself.
That's where vibe coding can be incredible. If you have a specific problem, an unusual routine, a personal workflow, or a very particular need, AI lets you create a custom tool without waiting for someone else to build it.
A personal tracker. An automation for your job. A time-saving tool. An app that doesn't need thousands of users because the user is you.
But even here, we need to be honest. Most personal problems aren't as significant as we think when we're excited.
Many personal apps begin with huge hype. You use them for a couple of days. Then forget them. They become another abandoned project.
Building for yourself can work, but only if the problem is real and persistent. Something that hurts every day. Something you've tried solving other ways. Something you'd use even if nobody saw it.
That's the test. If you're only creating because you enjoy feeling progress, you'll eventually abandon it. If you're creating because you need the tool, it may be worthwhile.
A pretty app is no longer enough
Here's something else important. People are developing a sixth sense for low-effort products.
Before, launching something “pretty enough” could impress people and work. Today, too many apps look alike: the same structure, the same AI copy, and so on.
Users know. They may not be able to explain it, but they feel it. They feel nobody thought very hard. And they leave.
Vibe coding didn't only democratize creation. It democratized mediocre products too.
Now anyone can make something that looks real in minutes. Keeping a user for weeks or months is still difficult.
In fact, it's probably harder than before because people tolerate generic products less and less.
Everything is a subscription now. Apps solving tiny problems for $19 a month. “AI-powered” promises that are actually cheap wrappers with good design.
In this new world, launching first isn't enough. You have to launch something that feels necessary.
Nobody wants another subscription
There's an economic reality many ignore. People don't want another subscription. They already have too many.
Netflix. YouTube. ChatGPT. Spotify. The gym. Apps that used to charge once and now want money every month.
When another AI-built app arrives promising to help with something slightly better, the natural reaction is: “Do I really need to pay for this?”
Often, the answer is no.
That doesn't mean there are no opportunities. Of course there are. But the standard has risen.
If you ask for money every month, you need to solve something painful, frequent, or valuable enough. It has to improve a real part of the user's life or business.
That takes us back to the central point: AI helps you build faster. It doesn't turn something irrelevant into something necessary.
AI's real cost hasn't arrived yet
There's another important point: cost.
Many people are building with AI tools that are still subsidized in some way. You pay $20, $100, or $200 a month and receive enormous amounts of computing power, reasoning, and code generation.
That has created an illusion: AI will always be cheap, unlimited, and available for anyone to create fourteen-plus abandoned projects without consequences.
That model probably isn't sustainable as it stands.
If using the best models becomes more expensive, companies limit usage more, or subsidies shrink, many people will discover their “startup” depended on cheap AI tokens they didn't control.
That changes the equation.
When vibe coding is cheap, you can afford weeks of experiments with few results and little economic consequence.
But if building with the best models gets much more expensive, the questions get serious:
What happens to all the apps and projects depending on stable token prices?
How many AI-built apps exist only because tokens are still cheap today?
So is vibe coding over?
Not exactly. What's ending is the illusion.
The illusion that ideas alone win. That building an app equals building a company. That AI replaces judgment and taste. That “made with AI” still impresses anyone. That if you can create something, someone will automatically want it.
Vibe coding will continue as a tool. And it will be useful. Very useful.
For prototyping. Learning. Creating internal tools. Accelerating programmers' work. Helping designers, marketers, and founders bring ideas to life faster.
The lesson for entrepreneurs
If you're building with AI, keep going. But change your focus.
Don't ask, “What can I build?” That's no longer the right question.
Ask, “What's worth building?”
Then ask: “Who needs it? What pain does it solve? How will I distribute it? What would make someone pay? Why would someone use it more than once? What real metric tells me this matters? What part of this will I maintain when it stops being fun?”
Those questions aren't as easy as opening Claude Code and watching files appear. But they separate a business from another app nobody will use.
AI removed many technical barriers. It's harder to say, “I didn't build because I couldn't code.”
That also leaves you facing a harder truth: maybe the problem was never that you couldn't code. Maybe code was just the excuse.
The final idea
Vibe coding is very useful. It showed us that many more people can build software than we thought. That's good.
But it also showed something equally important: building wasn't the only bottleneck. It wasn't even the most important one.
The world doesn't need another abandoned app. It needs real solutions to real problems.
That remains hard. That's the difference.
Thank you for being part of this great community.
Pura vida!