u/vivri

I see a lot of back-and-forth on this sub - kids shooting their shot with a toy project, or a waitlist that never materializes, as well as folks replying with a knee-jerk reaction on any software project as if it were AI-slop, both if it were or were not the case (and then going around offering their services in a saturated market - which I find kind of ironic.)

I've also seen some folks here claiming to have vibecoded their own software - and honestly, I find it interesting. To me, it's the handyman-equivalent of someone with access to YouTube and a $100 HomeDepot gift card.

It's a bit of a long story - but the TLDR is that you cannot just vibecode something of actual value.

I'm a software engineer from Toronto, Canada, started programming in '09 and didn't stop til now. I always considered it a craft - there's a particular feel to a well-architected system, and a feel for sloppy design.

Around December of last year, I got an itch to create something interesting and useful for others - and see what this "vibecoding" hype is all about, and my partner and I came up with a few ideas. One of them was around a small scheduling and CRM app for tradespeople. I talked to my neighbour, who works as a handyman, and he said that he'd buy such an app if it allowed him to send an SMS to all his contacts at once. I said, no biggie - I'll come back to you in two weeks.

Opened Claude Code, loaded $300 into API credits (don't do that, kids - use the Max plan instead!), and went to work. A few days later, and I had a working Android app, on my own device. Holy shit, are software engineers even needed anymore? Should I learn a new trade? That was both exhilarating and concerning at the same time.

The app was simple enough - everything is local, uses the telephony service, reads contacts and converts to CRM clients, basic calendar and an SMS. Easy.

But the usability was shit. For every screen and interaction the AI created, I needed to redo it, rethink it in human terms. This is true for _every_ single step of the way. The AI is OK for creating some user-interface, but not a decent one.

My partner was behind the user look-and-feel for the app and websites. Here it's actually pretty easy to say - the human (almost) always does it better. Maybe in 6 months to a year it won't always be the case.

Testing started to reveal issues - tons of assumptions were taken by the AI, without consultation with me. Edge-cases failed for no reason I could tell. Fixing took a lot of time, digging into Android documentation, debug logs, extended Claude sessions.

Then the (first) big one came - I tried to send a message to over 100 folks at once. It started bouncing. I realized my provider flagged me as a spam sender. Digged deeper - ok, this needed background threads and a scheduling queue with backoff and retries. Few more days, done, tested, working.

Looked into how iPhone does it - Jesus H Christ, iPhone doesn't support sending SMS on the background - so Twilio needed to be wired in. Where there's Twilio, there's also a backend. Chose Firebase for simplicity and ubiquity. Ensured all key secrets aren't publicly visible. Ensured everything's wired. A week passed by - it started working. Still looking through Twilio and Firebase logs hunting for errors once in a while.

Then more features by user requests - quoting, invoicing, analytics. First pass with a vague idea and vibecoding - man this is easy. Then took it to my accountant, he tore it apart. Went back, did a LOT of research on compliance regulations, different provinces / states, inter-province, inter-state. Several iterations later and more than a week later - accountant was happy, I was happy. Then business expenses - where do you count the taxes? How do you actually count revenue and profit - pre or post tax, and what if it's deducted? Finally, done. Invoice apps aren't easy, even if they look like it.

Then started marketing more - and what we heard was almost always "I actually need more leads" - so did a couple of passes on a website creator with a built-in leads form that instantaneously sends leads to the app and a notification. A Vercel NextJS site, security audit of secret keys and library vulnerabilities. Tearing through prod logs across several systems (app, Firebase, Vercel) - rince and repeat. Investigate why Firebase channels sometimes drop a message. It's working now!

This is just the "highlight reel" - and probably I omitted a whole bunch.

It took us around 6 months, on-and-off, to create something truly good that we're very proud of and can help folks where it counts. I don't believe that anyone can create something viable, that "just works" in under a month for a small product, under 3-6 months for a moderately complex one - and most likely under a year, until they find their true spot in the market (if they even get that far.)

If you'd like to see the results for yourselves - we stand behind our word - it's https://PocketClients.com

Hope it was an interesting read.

Cheers,

Victor.