You Think Vibe Coding Makes You Fast. It Doesn’t
Cheap code feels fast until the rebuild buries you
They call it agility.
They wear it like a medal.
Proof they are moving fast.
I have seen what comes after. The shortcuts. The promises. The rebuilds.
Founders boast about vibe coding. Skipping the red tape. Shipping with AI. No Code. Offshore shortcuts.
It sounds like hustle. It sounds like the cutting edge.
It is not.
It is panic development. It is short sighted. Expensive in the long run. Every fast feature gets rebuilt. Every shortcut compounds into chaos.
Why Vibe Coding Fails
You think the tool will save you.
You think the shortcut is the answer.
It feels fast. It feels like progress.
It is not.
Tools do not make the product. People do.
You can prompt ChatGPT all day. You can copy and paste from Stack Overflow. You can tell your engineer to make search like Google’s.
None of it matters if the decision behind it is wrong.
Vibe coding confuses typing code with choosing architecture. It assumes speed is about lines of code instead of judgment.
That is why your MVP collapses the moment you hire a second engineer. That is why investors stop believing your timelines.
Where the Real Value Lies
Speed looks like typing faster.
It looks like more lines of code.
But speed is not what it looks like.
Speed is what it costs.
Real velocity comes from judgment. Not shortcuts.
The right engineer knows when Stripe is the right choice, and when it locks you in. Knows when DynamoDB makes sense, and when it is a trap. Knows which corners can be cut, and which ones will cost you millions.
Magnus Carlsen does not win chess because he memorized openings. He wins because of his instincts. The same is true in engineering.
Give a sniper a better weapon and he becomes more accurate. Give the same weapon to an average shooter and you are gambling.
The Solution for Founders
You want speed. You want it clean. You want it now.
The truth is simple. Discipline creates speed. Judgment protects it.
If you want speed without fragility:
Hire scar tissue. Engineers who have scaled before. They know which rules to bend and which to enforce.
Thin slice architecture. Build minimal, structured foundations that do not collapse under growth.
Budget in the open. Share constraints so trade offs are honest, not wishful.
Bake in review. Pay for external code reviews, security checks, and accountability.
Redefine done. Works on my machine is not done. Demo ready is.
The Decisions That Cost the Most
This is where founders lose.
Not in features. In choices.
The wrong database will bleed you for years. Migrations are not quick. They break features. They slow teams. The engineer who chooses DynamoDB for a simple product without knowing the trade offs has already set fire to your budget.
The wrong payment system locks you in. Stripe is simple, but at scale the fees eat margins. Choosing without a plan to revisit costs you every month.
The wrong cloud setup punishes you when traffic spikes. Picking services because they look cheap on day one means rewriting them under pressure when real customers arrive. A founder who believes “we will scale later” is betting the entire roadmap on a rebuild.
The wrong release process creates chaos. A team without tests, without review, without a true definition of done burns trust with every deploy. Customers see outages. Investors see excuses. Your team sees broken promises. Fixing culture is harder than fixing code.
The wrong hire multiplies all of it. An average engineer with the wrong instincts will make a hundred small errors that compound. A strong engineer with scars from the past will make ten decisions that save you a hundred errors.
The wrong founder decision compounds even faster. Many set an artificial budget in their head and never tell the team. They demand speed, quality, and scale while hiding constraints. The result is frustration and churn. A team cannot build for a future it cannot see.
How Founders Can Apply This Tomorrow
You do not need a perfect system to avoid the trap. You need a few simple moves.
Tell your team the real budget. Do not keep it secret. The right engineers will make trade offs that fit the runway you have.
Thin slice your roadmap. Do not ask for Google scale search or Apple grade design in month five. Ask for a clean version that works for your first hundred users.
Buy review. Pay for external security checks. Pay for an experienced engineer to walk through the code once a month. Make it normal to have second eyes.
Set a real definition of done. Done means the feature is ready to demo to an investor or a customer without excuses. Done is not code that compiles on one laptop.
Hire for judgment, not price. A senior engineer who has already scaled saves you more than a cheap team that creates chaos. Look for scars. Look for the person who has lived through the wrong choice before and will never make it again.
Proof
I have seen founders vibe code their way to an MVP in weeks, then waste months fixing quick wins that turned into immovable blockers.
I have seen others hire experienced engineers, build lean but clean, and scale with confidence.
The difference was not the tool. It was the engineer.
The Founder’s Choice
You think vibe coding will save you time.
It will not.
The product is not the code. The product is the decision making.
Hire judgment, not gimmicks. Vibe coding does not ship companies. Engineers do.
I agree with you, James. People are all very pumped up about these new Vibe Coding tools, and justifiably so. It’s like any new product version 1.0; raw, limited, full of holes and problems. But, oh, the future is so exciting.
However, today’s reality for most startups should be that it's an excellent platform for validating an idea, but in most cases, not much more. This will change and change quickly. But for the moment, I do think we need a new acronym. An MVP implies you are creating a limited version of a new product; we should call something developed with Vibe Coding an MVE, a minimum viable experiment. An app that can be used to validate an idea before spending the time, money and effort developing a commercially viable solution.
The ability to use Vibe Coding for developing an MVE just might encourage more coders and indiehackers to embrace idea validation, and that would be a very good thing indeed.