At least my experience is that a vibe coded app gets to ‘early alpha’ then stays there. If AI is augmenting a developer who is otherwise competent and they don’t let it get ahead of their own understanding, it can work out though not as ‘miraculously fast’ as this. If AI can oneshot an application then it can also work out. If a project vibes itself in a week or two to ‘looks like what it should be but isn’t good enough’, then thus far every one I see is doomed to sit there, because the AI can’t finish it and if you let the GenAI produce that much code, it’s generally not serviceable even for very capable developers.

I spent a lot of time last week basically peeling back an overly vibed attempt at an application by a colleague. It was too flaky and incomplete and deleting large sections of it was frankly more practical than trying to rework it. It had gotten to the point where every attempt to try to have GenAI fix it one way would just break something else. That project was, essentially a fairly small command line utility, I fear to think what something the level of a Photoshop knockoff would be like.