When building a new product, people say you can’t “vibe code” production ready applications.

Products built on top of these platforms won’t hold up with a lot of users in a production environment.

Ok…so what?

Most products never get any traction at all. A recent study on Product Hunt launches showed that 487 of 500 launches this earlier this year were dead 6 months later. Only 13 survived.

“Vibe Coding” a product only to have it start breaking under the weight of usage would be an amazing problem to have. A problem so good most people won’t experience it.

Vibe coding a prototype vs “real engineering” is a false comparison. I remember this exact argument from agencies who built websites when products like Squarespace and Webflow started to emerge.

When building a new product from scratch you make technical tradeoffs all the time, racking up tech-debt along the way. You do the minimum you can to get whatever you can out the door to solve the problem and and fix it later. Right now matters more than later because, for most, there isn’t a later.

In fact, many startups don’t move fast enough because they over-engineer early products, limiting flexibility.

If you get real traction, your product will buckle under the weight of that success, regardless of your starting point. You will always have to fix the problems your early decisions introduced.

The same is true for vibe coding – you might be starting off from a worse technical position, but you can test an idea really inexpensively in a very flexible way. If you start getting traction, you can fix it in real time, like you would with any “real” startup product.

If you’ve got an idea you want to try, just try it! Maybe nobody uses it, and you’ve invested little. Your best case is that you build something people want and you scramble to keep the product running, a great problem most startups wish for!