r/AskVibecoders

same as title

I’m planning a mobile app for people who play amateur football.

The app would include things like:

• User profiles and ratings
• Creating and joining matches
• Team/club system
• Matchmaking
• Player positions and lineups
• Match confirmation and results
• Chat and notifications
• Leaderboards
• Basic admin/moderation tools

The UX/UI design and the entire user flow are already fully planned out, so I’m not starting from just an idea. I already know how the screens, flows, roles, and main features should work.

I’m not a developer, but I’m willing to spend time learning and build it step by step using tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, etc.

Do you think an app at this level is realistically possible to build solo with vibe coding?

At what level of complexity does vibe coding usually start becoming difficult to manage?

Would love to hear from people who have actually built and launched something similar.

I'm going on a trip this weekend and want to leave my coding agent running while I'm away.

Is there a tool that lets me control Codex from my phone ?? (instructions, approve, commit, etc)

Has anyone here figured out a good way to do this?

32M non-technical founder.

We recruited a Waterloo intern to work for us over the summer. The school said great things about him (Olympiad participant, hackathon winner, etc.).

He was in charge of programming 4-5 new features for our main app, as well as integrating them into our codebase using documentation and already existing functions in the program. The whole program was designed to last 3 months, but he was done in two weeks.

Basically, I spent the whole summer giving him tasks he would finish in a couple of days, and he ended up doing 3-4x more than any other new grad technical member of the company. I do know he works a lot with AI (Claude Code, Folk, etc.), but I'm still not sure how I should feel about it.

Is this kid extremely talented, or are my two new grad SWE engineers just bad? Is this normal?

Last college football season my family did this little pick’em thing. Three picks a week, ten bucks to join, winner takes all. We ran it on a Google Sheet and it was fun at first, but as more people joined it turned into a headache. I was updating stuff by hand, people were messing with cells, and it just got messy.

So this offseason I decided to try building something to fix it. I had zero experience. I didn’t even know what a DNS record was. Didn’t know what a terminal was. I’ve learned a ton and honestly had a blast building this.

I made a simple football pick’em site called Pikpool.com. Not trying to monetize it or anything right now. I mainly want to use it for friends and family and just get better at building stuff.

Here’s how I built it so I follow the rules here.

I used Supabase for the database and auth.
I used Cloudflare for the domain and hosting setup.
I used Claude Code for pretty much everything else. It helped me write the code, fix stuff I broke, explain things I didn’t understand, and keep me moving forward.

Oh and I'm using free odds api.

My workflow was basically me asking Claude Code how to do something, trying it, breaking it, asking again, and eventually getting it to work. I kept it simple. Groups, weekly picks, standings.

I’m brand new to all this and just want some nice, honest feedback. Tips, tricks, stuff I’m missing, better ways to structure things. Anything helps.

Appreciate anyone who checks it out and gives me something to improve on.

EDIT: I changed it so you do not need to create an account to check it out! Please check out Pikpool.com and let me know what you think!

Hi all, I was wondering if anyone tried to sell these services as a service in form of an agency? Do any of them exist out there, are they successfull? Could this be a one man band (non developer) or not AT ALL?

Mine keeps growing every time I solve a new problem.

At this point I’m not sure which instructions are still useful and which ones are just adding noise.

Do you split yours into separate files or skills?

I keep writing long descriptions of spacing, alignment, and responsive issues, and the result is still not what I meant.

Would you send the screenshot first and let Claude identify the differences before asking it to edit anything?

Has that worked for anyone here?

I have a lotta free time at work and I'd like to actually do something useful with it.

I'm thinking programming, but not really in a "learn this skill for a job" kind of way. More like solving problems for fun. Something I can sit down, work on, get stuck, figure it out, and get that little dopamine hit when it finally works.

Basically, I want programming to feel more like playing a game than studying.

Any recommendations? Coding challenge sites, projects, puzzles, anything like that. Hook me up.

Let's say I wanna build a dashboard

is there a website/AI i can just ask give me clean design dashboard.

then it give me a pic, so i will give the pic to Cursor/Claude to code for me.

I think I have a half decent idea for a SAAS but I need to validate this idea before I dump time and potentially money into it. I just need a working demo to show potential customers if they would be interested in such a Service.

Now my dilemma is, should I hire someone or just vibecode this myself? obviously Hiring someone would maybe get me a better product, but I want to know if this product will justify the cost first.

I am considering getting started with the top tools like Emergent, bolt and Lovable, but i am not sure which one to proceed with at this stage.

Any thoughts? Opinions?

I’m currently paying $160+ a month across AI tools, productivity apps, and vibecoding tools. Is there a single agent or tool that can do all of it?

(excluding model tokens, ofc: Claude, Codex, etc.)

I see the same question a lot lately: "app's built and live, but nobody's using it. What do I do?" I comment on these a fair bit, so I figured I'd put the thinking in one place. None of it is magic, but it's what I keep coming back to.

It always comes down to the product. There's no universal channel. Instagram can be great, if your audience is actually there. But if your app is for, say, a business person in a specific job function, Instagram probably isn't where you start. Are you already in a bigger community that would be a perfect target audience? Start there, and collect feedback while you're at it.

Have a strategy before you spend. The most common mistake I see is throwing money into ad spend and hoping. Even if you're running it all yourself, it's worth having someone with a marketing background help you shape the strategy first, and it usually pays for itself versus burning a budget testing blind.

When it underperforms, look at the funnel first, not the app. It's completely normal that your first setup doesn't perform like the biggest apps out there. Before you conclude "the app is bad," trace where people actually drop off: are they responding to messages, clicking the ad, spending time on the page, hitting download, getting through onboarding, starting a trial? Once you know where it breaks, you can fix the right thing. Sometimes it's the landing page, sometimes the ad creative, targeting, platform, or the paywall. Track, test, optimize. Repeat.

Free channels are real but limited. You can reach target-audience communities for free (Reddit, FB groups,..) and lean on friends, connections and family for the first push. But if you want to stand out in an already-crowded niche, relying only on free channels is usually a long shot, honestly. It's a start, not a plan.

And if you're starting to doubt the app itself; run a quick QA round, or just put it in front of a few people (ideally without telling them it's yours) and watch what they do. Cheapest signal you'll ever get.

Curious what others have found:

What was your first channel that actually worked?

Did you start marketing before or after launch, and would you do it differently now?

Good luck with your projects! 🙂

I’ve been able to create WPAs, using claude code, now, Im going to make an app for apple / google store for a friend’s new business. he wont be doing any payments on it, it will be scheduling, a push notifications to customers. it is one thing to make the app, a whole other thing to get the security right, which im not sure about. SO, are there companies or people, or something that can be the security engineer for the application to check it, etc? Or is what claude makes sufficient? and, any other tips on getting apps thru apple and google would be appreciated.

Hey, I’m trying to find the best AI setup possible for €20/month max.

I use AI a lot for coding, research, learning, brainstorming and building stuff.

Could be one subscription or a combination of different tools.

If you had €20 to spend, what would you get? And how much do you actually use it / do you hit limits?

(could also be a 1 time offer or cheaper with VPN or so)

I’m a startup founder, and we’re funded by a large, well-known VC fund.

We recently recruited this Stanford kid because he looked great on paper. He had won a bunch of hackathons in college and did great in his internships at Meta and Amazon.

He gets paid competitively, almost $200k, and even has equity in the company. However, most days, he doesn’t even come into the office and just codes from home and we've recently found out he's just vibecoding…

We found out by reading the comments on his code, which made it pretty obvious. His stack is Claude Code, Folk, OpenClaw, and Cursor.

Don’t get me wrong, his work has been fine up to now, but I never knew he was a vibecoder and was just pushing AI-generated code into our codebase. I’m not technical and often find myself a bit disconnected from the tech bubble.

Is it normal for a founding engineer to vibecode in August 2026?

I was an investment banker in my early 20s and decided to switch to VC as a potentially better alternative for my career. I previously thought that startups writing code with AI was generally a bad sign, that it meant they weren't the strongest technically. (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Folk)

Is this now the norm for startups? How recurrent is it to have a fully vibecoded codebase?

Before you start frying me, I have been seriously disconnected from the tech sphere and major tech news for several years.

I figured I'd ask here because I'd rather hear from actual regular developers than get the polished bs VC answer.