Ask HN: Have any successful startups been made by 'vibe coding'?
34 nomilk 58 8/19/2025, 2:51:39 PM
A couple of years ago, there was slowly growing hype around 'no code' tools, which some claimed may one day replace tradition software development (i.e. programming). Despite a reasonably extensive search, I couldn't find a single successful SaaS or software startup that was made using 'no code' tools.
There were stories of people validating their idea using 'no code' i.e. building a very crude version of their startup quickly, and deeming 'no code' very useful because the benefits of fast idea validation outweighed the downsides of 'no code' (e.g. inextensible design, UX deficiencies, 'toy app' feel etc).
Fast forward to today, there's a lot of hype around 'vibe coding', which can make existing devs more efficient. But have there been any cases of someone who couldn't previously code being able to make a successful start up by way of 'vibe coding', if so, who/what?
Once your codebase reaches the size needed to solve actual business problems, the quality of the output varies wildly, the complexity of the prompts required to produce useful code increases, and the output code requires significant editing to actually integrate without bugs or errors.
My personal opinion is that for vibe coding to be viable as the complexity of feature requirements or the size of the code base increase, the specificity and complexity of the input prompt will eventually demand more from the engineer than just writing the code, since code is more specific by definition than natural language.
Mind you, we're talking zero review at all, just using whatever the LLM produces.
I basically use LLMs to plan work, then to do the backend work with close supervision, then I do all the UX stuff completely on my own.
I've been using VSCode's Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4 and find it to be terrifyingly competent running 8 hours a day costing ~$10.
I am developing techniques to keep it moving forward producing code and fast. First, prompt engineering like "write clean, simple, and elegant code." Second, I use TypeScript very strictly which helps. Third, the models are amazing at producing very simple test units which will be important in the fifth. Fourth, I use techniques like "look for opportunities to refactor pure functions in the file and put them at the top of file" or "look for opportunities to refactor pure function and put them in shared utils.ts file." Fifth, every hour or so, I will have the agent simplify and clean the code and with complete test coverage both unit and integration as longs as they all pass .... good to go.
This is a process and it is the same every time. So now I'm thinking about how do I write code to automate these steps into an automated process. For example, I keep using the same pattern of steps to solve hard debugging problems which I'm going to leave out of this conversation now. If I can create a process in code, I'd be one step closer to complete automation coding.
The patterns are emerging. I strongly believe in 12 months these systems are going to be able to write extremely complicated programs with very little input from the human in the loop.
I very heavily use the VSCode Copilot coding agents for all this.
These are not trivial problems.
And they usually try to sell you their courses/mentorships.
I don't know if I'm being suspicious because they seem fake or because they came out of nowhere and are earning in a month what I make in a year.
Just like you said, they all claim to make $xk per month and have a course to sign up for. I really hate this as places like product hunt are just gummed up now with Slapps (AI slop apps). The courses they sell seem to be how to quickly make Slapps, get people's email addresses and then use the authors email list management software (for a monthly fee) to endlessly send spam.
Step 1: Vibecode 5 trash generic apps (eg AI interior designers, gpt wrappers)
Step 2: Launch with paying 15k in google/meta ads
Step 3: Receive back ~5k in revenue
Step 4: Spam on twitter+linkedin clickbaity "heres how i reached 60K ARR in 3 milliseconds" posts to attract ex-crypto bros and hustlers
Step 5: Use your newfound following for sponsored content, courses and hopefully actual organic growth for your aforementioned trash apps
I've also seen incidents of those apps turning out to have security holes you can drive a truck through, and hiring professional help to move beyond their origins.
(I didn't keep notes of the companies and I don't want to specifically call any out, but they exist.)
I'm hoping this is a relatively short-lived trend. I think vibe coding tools for personal use and prototypes is to be celebrated, but vibe coding software that other people will depend on or even pay for is deeply irresponsible.
I want to find the time to fine-tune GPT-4o using before/after examples of code that fails the gates and then passes them. The hope being it generates gate-compliant code on the first try much more often, which is cheaper and more reliable than relying on a base model with brute-force retries. I think this might also align with research showing that grounding models in execution feedback yields order-of-magnitude gains in sample efficiency and improved code quality, not just speed [0][1].
References
[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04349
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02089
Here is one attempt at defining a TESTING.md that I pass to Claude Code [0].
Honestly, it is different from what I now use in other projects. For example, I have found that mutation tests are rarely worth the added complexity. I have not yet found a good way to enforce a deterministic gate that only permits “good” tests, so I settle on defining expectations in a markdown file that I pass to whichever coding agent I am using.
[0] https://github.com/Airbolt-AI/airbolt/blob/main/TESTING.md
More generally, I think vibe coding has replaced lots of mockups and demos for startups. There is really zero excuse to show slides or figma now in am early product demo. There are definitely startups succeeding on this basis, as in getting funding and signing up customers.
If success means being profitable and running stable software, I don't see vibe coding as currently able to carry a company all the way through, but it's definitely part of the journey now.
If it's a non-programmer trying to build a non-trivial software product with AI I haven't heard of anyone successfully doing that and I'm very confident in saying theres no chance it'll happen with todays AI
I've made a couple of things lately that I sometimes tell people are "vibe coded" because they were heavily facilitated by LLMs, but it's not really true in the pure, literal sense.
This is the same brand of person that was excited to get rich off NFTs and has now just moved on to slapps (AI slop apps).
Vibe coding is fun and great for personal projects or bootstrapping, but the specificity of the prompts needed to effect the change you want grows exponentially with the code base size to the point where you do just need to code it yourself and use the AI as a helper.
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> Claude: Sure! (proceeds to instantly vomit out a react crud app where none of the buttons do anything)
The “toy app” feel is really not a big problem if you put some effort into it. It’s very easy to see landing pages made with a one-shot request on Cursor, but if you put some effort into adjusting things, you can get to pretty good design in a fraction of the time.
To be clear, my position is “vibe coding” _must_ include _some_ level of coding by hand (not entirely prompting an AI), at least with the current generation of tools.
Another tidbit, in my personal experience, is that lovable & co are enabling completely non-technical people to push out hot sites, marketing material, etc (including simple interactive experiences, for instance) quite flawlessly and quickly. This would require a dedicated engineer at least, in the past. It’s what the “no code” promise of years past was supposed to enable (IMO it didn’t, webflow/etc are clunky and hard to use even for non-coders).