Ask HN: Any example of successful vibe-coded product?
Many people talk about vibe-coding and about the different ways to use this development "methodology" successfully. I wonder though if anyone really managed to push to production anything that has been fully or almost fully created through LLM assisted coding. Do you have anything to share, whether you or someone else created it? Possibly something more complex than a static webpage.
100% of the code I produce now is written by this framework. I am working on several projects that will be in production shortly (and have done this before without AI).
I also use it to index websites and manage nanobanana prompts. So it’s production ready for me.
I’ve done ~10 rides with it so far. Hoping I can convince my wife to use it and save myself $50 a month. That would be my most successful side project by a wide margin.
There are probably a lot of examples like this. Vibe coded software people made for themselves, and other people could use it if they wanted.
All of the code was reviewed by myself, and I’m a programmer, so not sure if that fits the description. I didn’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb, however, and 90% of the review was on my phone. I also did some non-vibed setup for hosting, db, email, etcetera.
To me vibe coding is not looking at any of the code at all, but the definition reads a little loose to me these days, especially on HN, as: did an LLM “type” most of the code or did you? Either way I don’t think the term or definition is a big deal and probably not worth splitting hairs over.
Curious about what you're using as a cycling platform -- just the Peloton, or are you on a bike trainer? There's a huge library of workouts out there (see [0] as just an example), but mostly targeted at % FTP. The flow path is generally create your workout in an app to generate the FIT file, then upload to the bike computer (or use Zwift). But they tend to not support cadence range as yours does. Would love to find something that gives me %FTP and cadence range!
I’m using the peloton only. I bought a little iPad/phone mount that I put on the handlebars. I run the app on my iPad, put the peloton in “just ride” mode (no subscription needed) and match the cadence/resistance with the web app.
When it comes to cycling I’m a complete novice which is why the workouts have resistance as % of total (what peloton does) and I recently added an option where you can switch to relevant effort in settings.
I appreciate this comment because I didn't know what people typically did for creating their own workouts and recently learned about FTP. I'm going to look into this!
There are several interesting projects around peloton hacking that have served as inspiration:
These can be used in combination to use your Peloton with Zwift. Groupetto and Pelomon are really interesting. I'd like to integrate with something like Groupetto and use OpenPelo to have the full experience on the Peloton itself. That's kind of the end game, but I think the web app is the most approachable and easiest to get started with -- at least for me.
What do you mean you used your phone for code review?
I've lately seen a trend where people use their phone to instruct agent on the cloud to build applications.
I presume this is beyond having RDP on your phone
I use Claude Code on the mobile app, it creates a PR, I click the link which takes me to the GitHub mobile app, I turn my phone landscape and scroll through the code. I give feedback in the Claude mobile app if needed and it pushes additional commits.
I try to keep my instructions pretty targeted so there aren’t too many LOC and files changed. That’s the goal at least.
I deploy on Vercel, so I get a preview build link I can click in the PR and try the site before I merge to main (trunk based). I use Supabase so if there is a DB migration I just run it in the Supabase console by copy pasting the SQL.
When I merge the PR it deploys to prod. This works pretty well for me.
Keep in mind that a lot of vibe-coded software is flying under the radar because it’s being built to replace SaaS and bring workflows in-house. We often judge success by public launches or ARR, but the real "killer app" for this methodology right now is internal tooling for small teams.
For example, instead of spending developer bandwidth integrating Salesforce into first-party data, teams are increasingly just vibe-coding a bespoke CRM or CMS as an appendage to their existing database. It’s complex software (state, auth, heavy logic), but it will never be on Product Hunt because it's purely for internal utility.
The success metric here isn't "did we get 10k users," it's "did we avoid a $50k contract and weeks of integration hell."
I agree with your assessment, as a full stack dev with CS degree that just kinda waltzed into Salesforce for the last 5 years. Claude is more capable at delivering the customizability that Salesforce tried to offer with it's "clicks not code" approach. the only thing these CRMs have going for them is enterprise entrenchment.
I also work at Stripe and will be recommending that we migrate our CPQ off of Salesforce for various reasons (agent force is butt, platform limits are silly in 2025 - 6 meg max heap size for a backend transaction?????).
Yes this is like anyone sucessfully used their microwave over has anyone started a 1000 location fast food chain. At scale there are more microwaves than maccas.
I own a small bar and inventory management is either spreadsheets or saas products meant for larger operations. With the exclusion of some very small changes (e.g., deleting dead code) it’s 100% written using Claude Code. Initial design was generated from markdown documentation I wrote, and each change has been careful and incremental. A few blind alleys lead in the wrong direction, but was always easy enough to back up and try a different approach.
Database migrations and anything related to calculations have had a fair bit of hand holding. Beyond tests it writes I do still test by hand for confidence.
It’s coming up to a year of use. Claude Code credits has still not exceeded the cost of a paid product. I don’t count my time here because this doubles as keeping my technical side busy, and it’s been enjoyable.
This is a strange space in software. I have a tiny tissue culturing lab in my home and wanted to manage media batches and their ingredients, cultures using the batches of media, inventory for media ingredients, and general inventory for running things. Cleaning, cutting, measuring, etc. I couldn't find anything which would allow me to keep stock of what I've got in the structure I needed, let alone while also project things like "I've got enough inventory for n batches of y media". And all of the half-measure inventory software was expensive as hell.
I also built a solution for myself that was largely vibe coded. The underlying schema for inventories, batches, orders, cultures, etc was done in advance to help guide Claude along with documentation, but I'd guess 75 percent of the code is pure Claude.
It has worked really well for a while now. Since it's just me using it and I'm able to roll with issues it causes or verify outputs on the fly if I want to, it's totally fine not being super polished. It meaningfully increases my productivity by allowing me to manage things in a way that fits my mental model and business.
Like you, the cost of the project has been less than a subscription. And the subscriptions wouldn't even do what I needed.
Haha, no background. I might be the least educated person I know. I just enjoy learning new things, and this happened to stick with me. It's a very gratifying thing to do.
I culture plants which are popular in aquariums and terrariums. It's a nice way to get a break from software and science where I spend my days, get my hands dirty, enjoy refining different skills, make some money, and meet different types of people.
Tissue culture is a thing in the Cannabis world for efficiently reproducing and storing different varieties. I think it can also be used to create non-infected plants from plants infected with hop latent viroid.
I think the main issue is maintaining sterile conditions but its doable.
The technique for creating clean plants from infected plants is really cool and remarkably simple. You typically take tissue from the part of the plant called the meristem, where cells are actively dividing and less likely to be infected, then rapidly disinfect and transfer the tissue to a sterile culture.
It seems like it should be such a sophisticated and complex process, but all you're doing is cutting a chunk of fresh cells out and popping it into some goo where it can continue to grow.
Extracting meristem tissue is usually the only difficult part. They can be extremely tiny. It takes a sharp eye and very steady hands. I've only done it for practice, never out of necessity. I'm pretty bad at it.
It seems kind of like magic if you ignore the biologal machinery. It makes perfect sense why it works, yet it's also absolutely crazy that it does.
I’ve pushed a full-stack educational platform for parents, My DigitAlly, to production using what we call "Systematic AI Collaboration" (a matured version of vibe-coding).
It isn't a static site; it’s a production app with:
Full Auth: Google OAuth and email/password.
Engagement Engine: A node-cron system that automatically sends weekly tips to 200+ subscribers every Saturday.
Dynamic Curriculum: A 5-block lesson flow driven by a JSON-based instructional design framework.
Automated Resources: Auth-aware server-side PDF generation for parent checklists.
The "Methodology" that made it work:
We moved from initial idea to production in four weekends while I maintained a full-time role. The key was moving past "chaotic vibes" and treating different LLMs like specialized team members:
A) Strategic Layer (Gemini Pro): Used for architectural decisions (React/Vite, Node/Express, PostgreSQL/Prisma) and product prioritization.
B) Execution Layer (Claude Code): Used for heavy lifting—implementing the cron jobs, refactoring API patterns, and writing the test suite.
C) TDD as the Guardrail: We never "just coded." Every AI-generated feature followed a strict Test-Driven Development cycle using Vitest. If the tests didn't pass, the code didn't go to production.
The result is a stable system serving 200+ active users with a codebase that doesn't feel "schizophrenic" because we maintained strict cognitive boundaries and context documents for the AI to follow.
I built https://screenshot2charts.com, a tool that turns screenshots or CSV/JSON into editable charts. It solves the annoying problem of re-creating messy charts for reports and presentations, especially when all you have is a blurry screenshot of either a chart or some numbers.
From my experience, the biggest difference between vibe-coded projects that go somewhere and the ones that don’t isn’t code quality, it’s whether the builder keeps talking to users after the first version. The “vibe” gets you to ship, but iteration discipline is what turns it into something real.
My experience so far has been if you possess both deep domain-specific experience and significant coding experience then these coding LLMs, and most notably Opus 4.5, are the greatest productivity booster in the world.
It differs according to product. SecurityBot.dev has solid SEO because I put a lot of focused work into the landing pages. Interest in DependencyDesk has come exclusively through showing it directly to industry contacts.
The latter is partly what I was getting at regarding domain expertise because with that expertise comes an industry network. AI is great but if you’re creating solutions in search of a problem then the code doesn’t matter because nobody will need/want your product. I feel like your chances of success are much higher if you’ve personally felt the pain your product intends to solve, and that pain is built into the domain expertise people accrue over a long period of time.
I built two small products mostly using AI-assisted coding (plus a lot of manual glue work).
One is Solo Launches, a Product Hunt–style platform for solo founders where you can launch your SaaS for free. I built it in ~15 days as a self-taught dev. It’s live, used by real users, and started making revenue recently (~$100+ in December, verifiable on TrustMRR).
https://sololaunches.com
While growing it, I focused a lot on distribution and SEO. By submitting it to relevant directories, I managed to increase its DR noticeably. That process later turned into a second small product, listmy.site, where I help others get similar directory-based backlinks.
https://listmy.site
Both are fairly simple full-stack apps, but they’re in production, have real users, and generate revenue — mostly built with LLM help + iteration. Happy to share more details about the stack or workflow if useful.
Not sure how you would define successful though. I built a Firefox addon almost entirely through vibe coding and I know at least 5 other random souls on the Internet who have used and thanked me for it. But it is by no stretch, if popularity or how much money it makes, are the measures.
I was trying to test the theory if it's even possible to release something production grade with vibe coding. Wrote about the experience here https://kau.sh/blog/container-traffic-control/
I have a few vibe coded bots hanging around on discord and reddit that are helping out. One's posting cards for the game terraforming mars in response to users requesting it for example. They're appreciated by the community.
It's simple but i wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't a 10minute "Hey Claude create a ..." job. Having programmed a Reddit bot back in 2014 for xwing miniatures it took me several days to create it back then.
Here is an web app that tracks the grocery prices of my shopping at Aldi. It is meant to track grocery price inflation over time. It is obviously limited and incomplete since it is just based on my haphazard Aldi shopping. It includes a "basket of goods" total for each quarter, graphs, product pages, etc. It is coded by an LLM (except for maybe the initial commit). I don't write or edit the code, but I do sometimes "look" at the code, and ask for changes based on what code I see, so purists might question it as being 100% vibe coded.
Funny, i created an extension that does does something similar. I wanted to watch specific products at a grocery store that go on sale and look for the pattern. It opens page that has been flagged to watch and extracts data and then charts results for various things i want to track. It was more of a POC which has lead to some other data scraping apps i wanted. I am not a developer but know enough having worked around tech for awhile i can usually figure something out. claude has been amazing for me, especially since i can ask questions about its code/logic and learn as we go.
Vibe coded this with my son. Something I always wanted since we often record sporting events and want to know if it’s worth watching. So, successful in that sense and works in real time.
Sorry, just a vercel free tier project used by two people… Perhaps this is too much success. Seems to be a rate limit on one of the free data sources I use. Should be vibe-fixed now.
Piece Together is an animated puzzle game that I built with a fairly heavy reliance on agentic coding, especially for scaffolding. I did have to jump in and tweak some things manually (the piece-matching algorithm, responsive design, etc.), but overall I'd wager that LLMs handled about 80% of the work.
I've never seen anything like it since the original days of the game "The Island of Dr. Brain" released in the early 90s.
Love this. May a recommend some kind of "disperse pieces to edge" feature/button, (or perhaps automatic behavior, flag-to-enable or not), so that when you zoom-out a bit, you can automatically "disperse" all the pieces to the edge or at least "equally space them" in the available space, etc.
I.e. the problem is a lot of time spent on moving the pieces off-of each other. While this is more pleasent in real-life tactile space, not as much fun when using the computer to have to click-and-drag all the pieces around (of course, sorting them etc, is up to the user, but just some kind of initial "see all the pieces in the space without them overlapping each other to the greatest extent possible depending on the total space avaliable given the current zoom settings" ...
That's a good idea! I honestly futzed way too long trying to make this playable on smaller screens with that in mind.
The Shuffle button actually tries to spread the pieces out to cover the current zoom level, but it can still result in some of them being obscured. I'll look into implementing a more even distribution.
Created modfin.lyfbits.com. Wrote it to help me model and determine various types of investment scenarios. Continuing to work on it. Not strictly vibe-coded. I use a brainstorm -> write specs with Gemini (requirements, APIs, user journeys, user experiences etc.) -> ask Claude to implement from Specs -> iterate and refine until it is exactly what I want it to be.
I have found that the initial specs only go so far; as I use, "what's missing" becomes clearer.
Workflow is build -> checkin to git -> build container -> deploy to Cloud Run. I have a number of instructions for Claude for logs, frontend, backend, logging etc. based on my past experience. Note that I am mostly a backend developer (AWS, Azure, GCP); I can't code frontend to save my life and on that front, the agents are helping me realize ideas rapidly.
Problem statement: given a start date and a bible book / chapter, produce a reading schedule for the remainder of the bible assuming one will read 3 chapters every day and 2 extra on Sunday.
So assuming an input of "2025-07-06 Genesis 1," the list would read "Saturday, June 6, 2025: Genesis 1 (3 chapters) \n Sunday, June 7, 2025: Genesis 4 (5 chapters)..." etc.
It created the types, data structures, and utility functions required, and even isolated the schedule generation to a function that used all of them ... and that function was busted. It printed the same book and chapter and date every line.
With a little elbow grease I was able to bring it home. Saved me an hour.
I once created a pomodoro multiplayer application after being frustrated by https://cuckoo.team (although good software, nothing against the team) just not working/actively glitching
spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/
I created it as a single main.go with just a single main dependency (gorilla websockets iirc) and I think It's pretty successfull between me and my friends and I am not thinking of monetizing it ever
I made it out of complete frustration and the first prototype was built in <30 minutes but I guess I won't really take credit of it because I am just pleasant that I can now use such a software and perhaps other might too.
I don't know but I am very gloomy about AI mostly but prototyping in domains I don't know too much about to create a "just good enough" for my own use case is the only valid use case I find of it I guess.
There's two main apps that I've built. It's been a hell of a journey but a fun one, I'll list them below, but the most fun was actually adding an "explore" feature to my site to make it a bit more fun and interactive over the christmas break - https://blazingbanana.com/ - I might keep it, might not but was cool to see what can be done in browser with WebGL.
https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle - Whistle, which is a complete free, offline voice transcription app using whisper, available on all platforms, Linux, Mac, Windows (with CUDA builds), Android (and iOS as soon as my dev account goes through, who knew paying Apple £79 would be so hard!). To be honest the packaging part was probably the toughest bit and all the different ways each platform needs to build. - Probably my most "successful" one, at 450+ downloads on the Play store.
https://formait.app/ - Free offline document formatting using LLMs to take a load of unstructured notes and give you a nice PDF output. You can load any GGUF model you throw at it as it's implementing llama.cpp, but uses Phi-4 out the box. It's actually quite a useful combination with Whistle, so thinking of integrating voice to text in at some point. This is available on all platforms (except mobile) with CUDA builds available too.
I made 'Great Filter' - Chrome extension to filter content on social media based on custom instructions in natural language (using LLM). Supports HN, too!
I recently built a website to visualize the polling preferences of political parties in Slovakia, https://volebneprieskumy.sk/. I wanted to see an interactive graph showing polling trends for potential coalitions, but nothing like that existed!
Not sure this counts as "successful" yet (invite-only beta, still rough), but I'm building a full product almost entirely via LLM-assisted coding.
Tangents (https://tangents.chat) is an Angular/Nest/Postgres app for thinking-with-LLMs without losing the thread.
- Branch: select any span (user or assistant) and branch it into a tangent thread so the main thread stays coherent.
- Collector: collect spans across messages/threads into curated context, then prompt with it.
- You can inspect a "what the model will see" preview and keep a stored context-assembly manifest.
Vibe-coding aspect: about 600 commits and about 120k LOC (tests included) and I have not handwritten the implementation code. I do write specs/docs/checklists and I run tests/CI like normal.
What made it workable for something larger than a static page:
- Treat the model like a junior dev: explicit requirements plus acceptance criteria, thin slices, one change at a time.
- Keep "project truth" in versioned docs (design system plus interface spec) so the model does not drift.
- Enforce guardrails: types, lint, tests, and a strict definition of "done."
- The bottleneck is not generating code, it is preventing context/spec drift and keeping invariants stable across hundreds of changes.
If you define "vibe coding" as "I never look at the code," I do not think serious production apps fit that. But if you define it as "the LLM writes the code and you steer via specs/tests," it is possible to build something non-trivial.
Happy to answer specifics if anyone cares (workflow, tooling, what breaks first, etc.).
Aggregator for finding things to do with kids in Finland.
At a family gathering was asking a relative how his beginner level programming course was going. Was blown away to learn that he had just vibed this and now had already a steadily increasing stream of traffic. I had already used it myself.
I'm not sure how you would define "successfully," but I've created 3 different Windows apps using nothing but vibe coding (I'm not a coder) that I use for work and one app I use for exercise (a basic, browser based Tabata program that for whatever reason does more than any android app I've been able to find, and for free). They're fairly simple things, but they get the job done in ways that did not exist for me before.
And, again, I'm not a coder and only know the absolute basics of programming. This is not something I would have been able to do without AI assistance.
There's also the fact that many programmers working on software today both big and small use AI to one degree or another, maybe not to program the whole thing from scratch, but definitely to help ease the process. It's an invaluable tool.
I've made a few small projects that were built almost exclusively with Cursor (if that's considered vibe coding, I'm not sure). They don't have many users.
This has become a pretty pointless thing to clarify now but
"Vibe coding" and "AI-assisted coding" are NOT the same.
There's a spectrum of AI use from none to full (vibe coding).
Claude Code is probably the best known example of a product claimed to be coded with AI-assistance to the point of much of it being autonomous now guided by experts. My experience is that is now the norm for many senior engineers and it's certainly the future. I don't know any that are truly vibe-coded but I would imagine plenty of mobile apps.
I produced https://lynxprompt.com as an IDE/tool-agnostic AI config rules generator & catalog, via CLI & WebUI. There is a lot of love (and $$$) put in the Wizard generator, you can check it both via CLI or WebUI.
I've got some users and the stuff I can do each time I start doing vibecoding is astounding. Obviously 50% the work is just fixing what the AI didn't understood or imagined too much, but having a good AGENTS.md is key (and patience from me) - so that's why I'm buidling LynxPrompt indeed, for having an easy way to own a good AGENTS.md file for my next projects... and hopefully you too.
I've built products that solve my problems and have released one, Intraview.ai -- it's functional, solves a real problem for me and my customers.
That said, as a business goes, it's not a sensation but it's gone from idea to customers using it in less than 6 months. Is it a VC hit, no -- am I happy with where it is and how fast I'm learning -- absolutely!
I cloned Paddle's NextJS starter kit[1] and incorporated my previous reporting code built with Observable Framework[2].
It actually took longer to get the website (domain, terms, privacy) approved by Paddle and my identity verified by its 3rd party than to vibe code the site with Claude Code.
It just boggles my mind that anyone would use something like this. Why would one send their data to some unknown company that internally likely just delegates the work to one of the big AI labs?
i am about to incorporate my first business, https://querypanel.io. I vibe coded it, but i reviewed every line of code. I created the architecture on my own so i would say it was spec driven.
I have 15+ years of experience in engineering and i think AI is a good thing if you consider your self as an engineer. It speeds things up. Specially opus 4.5 or gemini 3 pro.
A lightweight GTK Linux chat client that is not based on any web tech and supports most of the features offered by the various API's out there such as audio and image gen.
i'm vibe coding vibium, a test automation tool in the spirit of playwright and selenium. (was #1 on hn last week for a little bit with a lively discussion.)
I wrote Sum Buddy using a variety of AIs. Its a full featured AI spreadsheet. It started in Gemini's web interface and moved over to claude (which was a huge increase in capability). It has a bunch of paying customers now.
My friend created an iPhone app that controls a set of MCP servers that will control all the smart things in his house. Completely vibe coded. The servers are in Python, which he can read but not really write, and the app is in Swift, which he doesn't understand at all.
It's a little more complicated than that. :). He has 100s of smart things from tens of providers, and they all work differently. He wants to be able to do things like say "light the path from the bedroom to the kitchen with dim light" and have it do the right thing, which means turning on all the lights with their various APIs all to the right brightness, and understanding what lights lead from the bedroom to the kitchen.
I built an iptv proxy that supports scheduled recordings, as well as proxying playlist and binary protocol streaming. Containerized I run this for my wife who watches a lot of foreign tv.
This last weekend I built from scratch a event driven design simulator for visualizing my system design work with a godot gamified presentation so I can step thru event impact with people rather than looking at static diagrams.
I wrote none of the code.
Spent maybe 2 hours refactoring some things, but nothing significant. Passed my reviews, was very pleased with results.
Quite liking codex models, though still get faster iterations and good results with sonnet.
https://spaceword.org - a daily word game inspired by banana grams, where you need to arrange 21 letters in a tight square. Has around 400 daily active players.
I'm pretty familiar with the underlying stack, which helped a lot since I knew the pitfalls. But pretty much all of the code is written by an LLM.
After a while, you hit a maxima where the LLM can't really add anything without breaking something else. You are always limited by what you know (which if you fully vibe coded the thing, then it's nothing?). You can get a bit farther by decomposing parts of the app into react components but after that you are stuck.
In real life, any clearly "vibe-coded" product was practically a shit-show especially in terms of UX. You can see the UI but things are quite unstable/unreliable. I have yet to see a fully vibe-coded product that actually works.
FWIW, I am building a market place app in rails and trying to vibe code the majority of it. Mostly with Gemini CLI + Cursor.
Its been very decent so far. Time will tell if the PMF is there for the MVP, but thats on the product, not the AI generated code slop.
FYI, this was more of a hobby horse + learning project than an "enterprise SaaS requiring SOC2 compliance." I am basically building a toy. So far, I have learned that you can ship code toys very quickly to test a market demand with an MVP.
Why do I read about all the vibe coders claiming to be 20X engineers in LLM threads and replacing many departments. Yet here is not a fking single commercially successful thing here?
Funny also how Loveable and the like are hiring engineers like crazy, yet think engineers are not needed anymore. Why not just vibecode Loveable itself? Oh wait I can tell you why.
You could probably find a good answer anywhere, but the solution is in a more nuanced view.
Some types of programming benefit more from AI tooling than others. For example, prototyping seems to be the most fruitful area. Also, writing small utilities is much easier, to the extent that a two hour job would now take only a few minutes. That's where you get the multiplier posts from.
But working in a large codebase using proprietary libraries is not a solved problem for AI (yet).
It's just that the average engineer does not spend all of their time on things that can be sped up.
Speeding up 1% of your time by a factor 20 simply does not help very much. But for some roles, I'm sure that a 10% net increase in productivity is realistic.
ive seen people using lovable in the wild now, and theyve made things that they are using themselves, and are working on something like a 5-10M CAD/y business serving the oil industry.
I didnt join them because I dont really want to do all the work that comes with owning a business like the accounting. mostly the accounting. i also dont particularly want to be maintaining an extra couple of systems at present. there mught be vibe coding currently, but not vibe operations
they should have the thing up by june at their very slow rate of building with lovable, but theyre not people who would ever frequent HN.
Put "I don't have any experience in software engineering but can vibe code very well" on your resume and see if you get any interest from OpenAI or Anthropic or any one in the long list of companies that have declared software engineering dead and LLMs the future of coding.
It's telling that they will put their own applicants through a dozen rounds of stringent technical interviews, Leetcode exercises, use anti-AI assistance tools and pay their staff $500K or more, all for something they advertise as being easy to vibe code away.
That's a bit dishonest. Obviously, vibe coding is only productive for engineers who actually know what they're doing. Perhaps it is best to consider it a multiplier, not an enabler.
100% of the code I produce now is written by this framework. I am working on several projects that will be in production shortly (and have done this before without AI).
I also use it to index websites and manage nanobanana prompts. So it’s production ready for me.
I’ve done ~10 rides with it so far. Hoping I can convince my wife to use it and save myself $50 a month. That would be my most successful side project by a wide margin.
There are probably a lot of examples like this. Vibe coded software people made for themselves, and other people could use it if they wanted.
All of the code was reviewed by myself, and I’m a programmer, so not sure if that fits the description. I didn’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb, however, and 90% of the review was on my phone. I also did some non-vibed setup for hosting, db, email, etcetera.
To me vibe coding is not looking at any of the code at all, but the definition reads a little loose to me these days, especially on HN, as: did an LLM “type” most of the code or did you? Either way I don’t think the term or definition is a big deal and probably not worth splitting hairs over.
[0] https://whatsonzwift.com/workouts
When it comes to cycling I’m a complete novice which is why the workouts have resistance as % of total (what peloton does) and I recently added an option where you can switch to relevant effort in settings.
I appreciate this comment because I didn't know what people typically did for creating their own workouts and recently learned about FTP. I'm going to look into this!
There are several interesting projects around peloton hacking that have served as inspiration:
- [0] Peloton android app side loader: https://github.com/doudar/Openpelo
- [1] Overlays metrics on the Peloton: https://github.com/selalipop/grupetto
- [2] Bookmarklet to overlay cadence/resistance on web classes (this is what I started with): https://gist.github.com/rocng/2ff577948569ce0764b8938687841b...
- [3] Decodes Peloton metrics from the serial port: https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon
- [4] Transform Peloton into a smart trainer: https://github.com/doudar/SmartSpin2k/
These can be used in combination to use your Peloton with Zwift. Groupetto and Pelomon are really interesting. I'd like to integrate with something like Groupetto and use OpenPelo to have the full experience on the Peloton itself. That's kind of the end game, but I think the web app is the most approachable and easiest to get started with -- at least for me.
I've lately seen a trend where people use their phone to instruct agent on the cloud to build applications. I presume this is beyond having RDP on your phone
I try to keep my instructions pretty targeted so there aren’t too many LOC and files changed. That’s the goal at least.
I deploy on Vercel, so I get a preview build link I can click in the PR and try the site before I merge to main (trunk based). I use Supabase so if there is a DB migration I just run it in the Supabase console by copy pasting the SQL.
When I merge the PR it deploys to prod. This works pretty well for me.
I also work at Stripe and will be recommending that we migrate our CPQ off of Salesforce for various reasons (agent force is butt, platform limits are silly in 2025 - 6 meg max heap size for a backend transaction?????).
Database migrations and anything related to calculations have had a fair bit of hand holding. Beyond tests it writes I do still test by hand for confidence.
It’s coming up to a year of use. Claude Code credits has still not exceeded the cost of a paid product. I don’t count my time here because this doubles as keeping my technical side busy, and it’s been enjoyable.
I also built a solution for myself that was largely vibe coded. The underlying schema for inventories, batches, orders, cultures, etc was done in advance to help guide Claude along with documentation, but I'd guess 75 percent of the code is pure Claude.
It has worked really well for a while now. Since it's just me using it and I'm able to roll with issues it causes or verify outputs on the fly if I want to, it's totally fine not being super polished. It meaningfully increases my productivity by allowing me to manage things in a way that fits my mental model and business.
Like you, the cost of the project has been less than a subscription. And the subscriptions wouldn't even do what I needed.
I culture plants which are popular in aquariums and terrariums. It's a nice way to get a break from software and science where I spend my days, get my hands dirty, enjoy refining different skills, make some money, and meet different types of people.
I think the main issue is maintaining sterile conditions but its doable.
The technique for creating clean plants from infected plants is really cool and remarkably simple. You typically take tissue from the part of the plant called the meristem, where cells are actively dividing and less likely to be infected, then rapidly disinfect and transfer the tissue to a sterile culture.
It seems like it should be such a sophisticated and complex process, but all you're doing is cutting a chunk of fresh cells out and popping it into some goo where it can continue to grow.
Extracting meristem tissue is usually the only difficult part. They can be extremely tiny. It takes a sharp eye and very steady hands. I've only done it for practice, never out of necessity. I'm pretty bad at it.
It seems kind of like magic if you ignore the biologal machinery. It makes perfect sense why it works, yet it's also absolutely crazy that it does.
The "Methodology" that made it work: We moved from initial idea to production in four weekends while I maintained a full-time role. The key was moving past "chaotic vibes" and treating different LLMs like specialized team members: A) Strategic Layer (Gemini Pro): Used for architectural decisions (React/Vite, Node/Express, PostgreSQL/Prisma) and product prioritization.
B) Execution Layer (Claude Code): Used for heavy lifting—implementing the cron jobs, refactoring API patterns, and writing the test suite.
C) TDD as the Guardrail: We never "just coded." Every AI-generated feature followed a strict Test-Driven Development cycle using Vitest. If the tests didn't pass, the code didn't go to production.
The result is a stable system serving 200+ active users with a codebase that doesn't feel "schizophrenic" because we maintained strict cognitive boundaries and context documents for the AI to follow.
From my experience, the biggest difference between vibe-coded projects that go somewhere and the ones that don’t isn’t code quality, it’s whether the builder keeps talking to users after the first version. The “vibe” gets you to ship, but iteration discipline is what turns it into something real.
My experience so far has been if you possess both deep domain-specific experience and significant coding experience then these coding LLMs, and most notably Opus 4.5, are the greatest productivity booster in the world.
The latter is partly what I was getting at regarding domain expertise because with that expertise comes an industry network. AI is great but if you’re creating solutions in search of a problem then the code doesn’t matter because nobody will need/want your product. I feel like your chances of success are much higher if you’ve personally felt the pain your product intends to solve, and that pain is built into the domain expertise people accrue over a long period of time.
One is Solo Launches, a Product Hunt–style platform for solo founders where you can launch your SaaS for free. I built it in ~15 days as a self-taught dev. It’s live, used by real users, and started making revenue recently (~$100+ in December, verifiable on TrustMRR). https://sololaunches.com
While growing it, I focused a lot on distribution and SEO. By submitting it to relevant directories, I managed to increase its DR noticeably. That process later turned into a second small product, listmy.site, where I help others get similar directory-based backlinks. https://listmy.site
Both are fairly simple full-stack apps, but they’re in production, have real users, and generate revenue — mostly built with LLM help + iteration. Happy to share more details about the stack or workflow if useful.
Happy New Year
I was trying to test the theory if it's even possible to release something production grade with vibe coding. Wrote about the experience here https://kau.sh/blog/container-traffic-control/
It's simple but i wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't a 10minute "Hey Claude create a ..." job. Having programmed a Reddit bot back in 2014 for xwing miniatures it took me several days to create it back then.
https://aldi-prices.lawruk.com/ https://github.com/jimlawruk/aldi-prices
"I need a plumber in Austin who can come this week" "Looking to sell my MacBook Pro" "I'm offering piano lessons for beginners"
That's literally all you have to say.
Our AI understands what you need and connects you with people who can help. No endless scrolling. No complicated filters. No frustration.
Just speak your find.
https://speakyourfind.com/
https://www.donttellmethescore.com/nfl
I've never seen anything like it since the original days of the game "The Island of Dr. Brain" released in the early 90s.
https://mordenstar.com/projects/piece-together
I.e. the problem is a lot of time spent on moving the pieces off-of each other. While this is more pleasent in real-life tactile space, not as much fun when using the computer to have to click-and-drag all the pieces around (of course, sorting them etc, is up to the user, but just some kind of initial "see all the pieces in the space without them overlapping each other to the greatest extent possible depending on the total space avaliable given the current zoom settings" ...
The Shuffle button actually tries to spread the pieces out to cover the current zoom level, but it can still result in some of them being obscured. I'll look into implementing a more even distribution.
I have found that the initial specs only go so far; as I use, "what's missing" becomes clearer.
Workflow is build -> checkin to git -> build container -> deploy to Cloud Run. I have a number of instructions for Claude for logs, frontend, backend, logging etc. based on my past experience. Note that I am mostly a backend developer (AWS, Azure, GCP); I can't code frontend to save my life and on that front, the agents are helping me realize ideas rapidly.
Problem statement: given a start date and a bible book / chapter, produce a reading schedule for the remainder of the bible assuming one will read 3 chapters every day and 2 extra on Sunday.
So assuming an input of "2025-07-06 Genesis 1," the list would read "Saturday, June 6, 2025: Genesis 1 (3 chapters) \n Sunday, June 7, 2025: Genesis 4 (5 chapters)..." etc.
It created the types, data structures, and utility functions required, and even isolated the schedule generation to a function that used all of them ... and that function was busted. It printed the same book and chapter and date every line.
With a little elbow grease I was able to bring it home. Saved me an hour.
spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/
I created it as a single main.go with just a single main dependency (gorilla websockets iirc) and I think It's pretty successfull between me and my friends and I am not thinking of monetizing it ever
There is also https://spocklet-beta-pomodo.hf.space/ which has some more features to make it more user friendly that I got suggestion for so yeah
I made it out of complete frustration and the first prototype was built in <30 minutes but I guess I won't really take credit of it because I am just pleasant that I can now use such a software and perhaps other might too.
I don't know but I am very gloomy about AI mostly but prototyping in domains I don't know too much about to create a "just good enough" for my own use case is the only valid use case I find of it I guess.
My friend vibe coded the entire app to generate thumbnails for YouTube videos.
https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle - Whistle, which is a complete free, offline voice transcription app using whisper, available on all platforms, Linux, Mac, Windows (with CUDA builds), Android (and iOS as soon as my dev account goes through, who knew paying Apple £79 would be so hard!). To be honest the packaging part was probably the toughest bit and all the different ways each platform needs to build. - Probably my most "successful" one, at 450+ downloads on the Play store.
https://formait.app/ - Free offline document formatting using LLMs to take a load of unstructured notes and give you a nice PDF output. You can load any GGUF model you throw at it as it's implementing llama.cpp, but uses Phi-4 out the box. It's actually quite a useful combination with Whistle, so thinking of integrating voice to text in at some point. This is available on all platforms (except mobile) with CUDA builds available too.
Most of it was written by Claude Code. It even created the extension's logo (in SVG). Link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/great-filter/mbifgf... Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s50bI_O5tps
It's a website to read and analyze the Rig-veda.
It's not fully "vibe coded" but lots and lots of AI usage.
I also built a Preview Pane Handler for 10-bit videos.
The installers (WIX) were vibe coded as well.
So was the product website and stripe integration. I created a bespoke license generation system on checkout.
I don’t think I wrote a single line of C++ code although the WIX installers and website did receive minimal manual adjustments.
Started with Claude but then at some point during development Codex got really good so I used only that.
https://ruptureware.com
Tangents (https://tangents.chat) is an Angular/Nest/Postgres app for thinking-with-LLMs without losing the thread.
- Branch: select any span (user or assistant) and branch it into a tangent thread so the main thread stays coherent.
- Collector: collect spans across messages/threads into curated context, then prompt with it.
- You can inspect a "what the model will see" preview and keep a stored context-assembly manifest.
Vibe-coding aspect: about 600 commits and about 120k LOC (tests included) and I have not handwritten the implementation code. I do write specs/docs/checklists and I run tests/CI like normal.
What made it workable for something larger than a static page:
- Treat the model like a junior dev: explicit requirements plus acceptance criteria, thin slices, one change at a time.
- Keep "project truth" in versioned docs (design system plus interface spec) so the model does not drift.
- Enforce guardrails: types, lint, tests, and a strict definition of "done."
- The bottleneck is not generating code, it is preventing context/spec drift and keeping invariants stable across hundreds of changes.
If you define "vibe coding" as "I never look at the code," I do not think serious production apps fit that. But if you define it as "the LLM writes the code and you steer via specs/tests," it is possible to build something non-trivial.
Happy to answer specifics if anyone cares (workflow, tooling, what breaks first, etc.).
Aggregator for finding things to do with kids in Finland.
At a family gathering was asking a relative how his beginner level programming course was going. Was blown away to learn that he had just vibed this and now had already a steadily increasing stream of traffic. I had already used it myself.
And, again, I'm not a coder and only know the absolute basics of programming. This is not something I would have been able to do without AI assistance.
There's also the fact that many programmers working on software today both big and small use AI to one degree or another, maybe not to program the whole thing from scratch, but definitely to help ease the process. It's an invaluable tool.
https://spikelog.com
https://runnem.com
https://leveloh.com
https://thefudgesisters.com
https://hop.coffee
I'm write a few articles here about tricks that work for me when it comes to AI assisted coding: https://foundinglean.substack.com
"Vibe coding" and "AI-assisted coding" are NOT the same.
There's a spectrum of AI use from none to full (vibe coding).
Claude Code is probably the best known example of a product claimed to be coded with AI-assistance to the point of much of it being autonomous now guided by experts. My experience is that is now the norm for many senior engineers and it's certainly the future. I don't know any that are truly vibe-coded but I would imagine plenty of mobile apps.
I've got some users and the stuff I can do each time I start doing vibecoding is astounding. Obviously 50% the work is just fixing what the AI didn't understood or imagined too much, but having a good AGENTS.md is key (and patience from me) - so that's why I'm buidling LynxPrompt indeed, for having an easy way to own a good AGENTS.md file for my next projects... and hopefully you too.
I've built products that solve my problems and have released one, Intraview.ai -- it's functional, solves a real problem for me and my customers.
That said, as a business goes, it's not a sensation but it's gone from idea to customers using it in less than 6 months. Is it a VC hit, no -- am I happy with where it is and how fast I'm learning -- absolutely!
I cloned Paddle's NextJS starter kit[1] and incorporated my previous reporting code built with Observable Framework[2].
It actually took longer to get the website (domain, terms, privacy) approved by Paddle and my identity verified by its 3rd party than to vibe code the site with Claude Code.
[1] https://github.com/PaddleHQ/paddle-nextjs-starter-kit
[2] https://github.com/observablehq/framework
I have rebuilt it a few times in agent mode while trying to get pmf. I used about 22B tokens this year
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nosync-dj/id6752585119
https://github.com/therealtimex/realtimex-crm
It’s a suite of tools to navigate the Epstein files—it even made it into the news!
Here’s the HackerNews discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600
https://github.com/rabfulton/ChatGTK
I'm sure the code can be critisized, but I'm happily using the application I wanted that did not exist having never programmed python in my life.
https://sumbuddy.net
https://github.com/adrianco/c11s-house-ios
It's not commercially successful (it's a side project), but still represents a complete project.
I'm pretty familiar with the underlying stack, which helped a lot since I knew the pitfalls. But pretty much all of the code is written by an LLM.
Is it different for Claude?
https://github.com/pannous/goo (1% handwritten go extensions)
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/calmshows/id6749471333
ios and web app and openapi spec
https://alexjacobs08.github.io/lobsters-graph/
(i built this in search of a lobste.rs invite if anyone willing and able sees this--email in my bio :)
After a while, you hit a maxima where the LLM can't really add anything without breaking something else. You are always limited by what you know (which if you fully vibe coded the thing, then it's nothing?). You can get a bit farther by decomposing parts of the app into react components but after that you are stuck.
In real life, any clearly "vibe-coded" product was practically a shit-show especially in terms of UX. You can see the UI but things are quite unstable/unreliable. I have yet to see a fully vibe-coded product that actually works.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-slop-canvas/dogg...
I think it's decent complexity for something where I didn't even write one line of code. (all Claude Code)
Its been very decent so far. Time will tell if the PMF is there for the MVP, but thats on the product, not the AI generated code slop.
FYI, this was more of a hobby horse + learning project than an "enterprise SaaS requiring SOC2 compliance." I am basically building a toy. So far, I have learned that you can ship code toys very quickly to test a market demand with an MVP.
Funny also how Loveable and the like are hiring engineers like crazy, yet think engineers are not needed anymore. Why not just vibecode Loveable itself? Oh wait I can tell you why.
Some types of programming benefit more from AI tooling than others. For example, prototyping seems to be the most fruitful area. Also, writing small utilities is much easier, to the extent that a two hour job would now take only a few minutes. That's where you get the multiplier posts from.
But working in a large codebase using proprietary libraries is not a solved problem for AI (yet).
It's just that the average engineer does not spend all of their time on things that can be sped up.
Speeding up 1% of your time by a factor 20 simply does not help very much. But for some roles, I'm sure that a 10% net increase in productivity is realistic.
I didnt join them because I dont really want to do all the work that comes with owning a business like the accounting. mostly the accounting. i also dont particularly want to be maintaining an extra couple of systems at present. there mught be vibe coding currently, but not vibe operations
they should have the thing up by june at their very slow rate of building with lovable, but theyre not people who would ever frequent HN.
It's telling that they will put their own applicants through a dozen rounds of stringent technical interviews, Leetcode exercises, use anti-AI assistance tools and pay their staff $500K or more, all for something they advertise as being easy to vibe code away.