How AI Bosses Are Trying to Mislead Us Again with Vibe Coding
AI tech bosses are spreading the idea that thanks to their agents, everyone will be able to develop apps, set up a SaaS, and generate revenue from it.
For me, this is one of the typical ways these entrepreneurs oversell their product by building legends.
I have been getting my hands dirty with vibe coding for a few weeks now, and things don’t seem as simple to me.
As a matter of fact, anyone (including myself) can quickly develop a small single-function application and deploy it on the web or in the app store using Claude Code or Antigravity. It’s simple, it’s fast, and it takes very little time. In an hour, sometimes more, you can create a small tool to solve a problem for yourself or a colleague, as long as you are not too picky about UX and portability of the tool.
But if you want to build something more ambitious, it’s another story. The magical effect of vibe coding fades, and the real work begins.
My Vibe Coding Experience: Initial Feedback
Here’s what I’ve experienced these past days. Though vibe coding can provide a platform for people like me to express their creativity, it remains a development technique that brings as many frustrations and difficulties as “real” development.
Time Spent
What’s truly magical about vibe coding is that you lose track of time. Prompting and getting functions, seeing things come together and work, is captivating. Right now, I genuinely feel like I’m playing a construction game where I’m building worlds.
It’s almost effortless. Everything the AI asks of you is to have ideas and explain them. The AI executes, and you can go for a coffee or a cigarette between prompts. The AI thinks and produces.
Misinterpretation
I’ve learned to be extremely precise in what I tell the AI. What seems obvious to me isn’t obvious to it, and I used to think as if it were in my head, which is not the case.
If you don’t want to waste time, try to be as precise as possible, and sometimes re-explain things you’ve already explained. The AI can sometimes confuse two things and go down the wrong path without asking for your opinion.
AI Makes Mistakes: Control it
At first, I tended to let the AI work on its own, trusting it, but I quickly discovered that if you don’t control it, it can make mistakes, sometimes very annoying ones.
It completely erased my database.
It completely deleted the content of a code page.
In Antigravity, you can decide which actions it can perform automatically or not. I switched to a mode where I control everything. It forces you to stay in front of the screen, but it’s much safer.
The AI Struggles
Even though it knows a lot and can solve many problems, it can hit a snag and be unable to find a solution itself, even an obvious one. This is the most astonishing aspect of these agents. They can develop very complex programs and features without any difficulty, but get stuck on a small, very simple bug.
You can sometimes go around in circles for a long time, and that’s when technical knowledge is precious.
The AI is Greedy
An AI agent sometimes expends a lot of energy for nothing. For example, it might use a few minutes of work just to change a style property. I realised that for minor modifications, it was sometimes better to go into the code and fix the problem myself. And believe me, that happens often. Especially when the AI takes initiatives and “over-interprets” your request, doing more than you intended. More time lost ! And especially tokens !
Discuss with the AI
I also realised that development with AI is collaborative work. Don’t ask it to develop every time. Think with it. Modify its action plans. It’s very easy. In Antigravity, if you wish, the AI can explain how it will develop a function or try to solve a bug. Before it executes, you can ask it to modify its plan or you can propose other solutions. This too can save a lot of time.
Determination
It takes patience to vibecode. And passion. While everything seems easy, in reality, you need perseverance to move forward. Developing an app requires patience, the path to achieve a result is sometimes long and disheartening. Unless you want to create small demos like those seen everywhere on social media, developing a real application or even a SaaS service – which is the promise of AI vendors – is a new profession, just as complex and demanding as traditional development.
Conclusion
Vibe coding vendors, whoever they may be, promise ease and speed, but reality is far less glorious. Vibecoding is akin to a new profession at the crossroads of UX, development, product development, marketing, and many other things. It has become possible for one person to develop a service with vibecoding, but this can only be the first phase of a project. Soon, the need to surround oneself with others to implement the project will be felt.
I can well imagine that a new class of entrepreneurs is emerging from this movement, but we are indeed talking about entrepreneurs, meaning highly versatile individuals, capable of tackling a problem from different angles and possessing the business vision to capitalise on them. This vision should prevail, but it’s easier to sell dreams to everyone than to say that vibe coding primarily resembles a new facet of digital entrepreneurship and that embarking on the development of a service or an app will not make you rich quickly or without any effort. In fact, it would be quite the opposite!
