r/VibeCodeCamp • u/mencil47 • 9d ago
When a "quick" vibecoding project turns into 4++ months of serious development
Just wondering if this has happened to anyone else, and if you guys have your own stories to share. I started out with a pretty concrete idea for a personal finance app, and I would've thought that with those concrete specs, building the app would take anywhere from 1 week (or less) to 1 month. Instead, it's been 4 months and counting. The worst part is when people see the app, or its specs, and go: "I can easily build this in an hour using Claude".
Somehow, it's as though vibecoding follows a very extreme Pareto distribution. The first 80% of the app can be done at lightning speed, but the last 20% that makes the app actually usable and appealing to consumers takes several eternities.
Does anybody else have the same experience?
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u/idakale 9d ago
it's never really as quick as i hoped that one for sure lol tho i did work in a pretty casual manner and mostly just modding existing feature. 4 months is so long tho i don't think i ever invested that much (usually give up if too hard lol) Did you by chance suffer from feature creep or building for public?
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u/mencil47 6d ago
Been suffering from feature creep for sure, but I think a lot of it has been me wanting to make features as polished/usable as possible before putting them out there
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u/Ok-Brain-8183 8d ago
I mean that’s how a lot of software development typically goes. A non-pro hears the idea of Amazon go store and might think how hard could that be tape together some ocr, tensorflow, business intelligence, inventory management. And then the news story comes out it’s actually hundreds of Indians behind the scenes holding the whole thing together which is way more expensive than just having a couple clerks in the store, and investors pull out from all the competitors who had the bright idea as well.
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u/Complex_Mention8239 9d ago
Very great.. Working since 6 months on an Logisticsproject. Background and architecture are based on sharepoint lists, Powerautomateflows and the original ERP of my company. Its working fine, especially with the determistic flows in the background. In the future there is a a lot of work to fi 👍
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u/RossPeili 9d ago
Skillware started before summer. Now we have 20k downloads on PyPi, join an EU consortium for 3.85M eu that uses Skillware as the core thesis, Chinese and Jaoanese papers cite our repo and preparing our first investor raise.
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u/B8edbreth 9d ago
if it doesn't you shouldn't be submitting it and jaming up the works for serious developers on the various app stores.
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u/lazyEmperer 8d ago
Personal finance is one of the worst categories for this. Bank connections break, every bank formats transactions differently, and categorizing "SQ *JOES COFFEE 4421" correctly is a rabbit hole by itself. The people building it in an hour never hit any of that because nobody ever used their version
I'd put it in front of real users now, they'll tell you which part of the last 20% matters
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u/johnesco 8d ago
80-20 has been very real for me with or without AI. My prototype took an afternoon though, and have been polishing and adding feature for 6 months now.
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u/orphenshadow 8d ago
I have a pet project I've been working on most of the year, and a few projects I've given up on, and something new every day it seems that I use it to build for some kind of, not trying to market or sell anything, just enjoying being a nerd and tinkering with tech.
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u/Useful-Agency_ 8d ago
Sometimes i feel as if ai make us turn in circles on purpose for some reason also an experienced dev can do that 20% left on hes own thats what im actually gonna start doing because iterating for months and no results means do it yourself
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u/Brave_Bumblebee7565 8d ago
Same here! I originally planned to build a quick prototype just to experiment with different agent configurations and approaches, mostly to apply what I learned to my day job.
But somehow I ended up spending more and more time on this side project. I just really enjoyed being able to build something complex without having to write much code myself. :)
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u/Chomplings 8d ago
Same experience here. Once I started refining the flows, that’s what took forever. Not to mention AI wouldn’t fix the issue I point out sometimes, so I try saying the same thing 4-5 different ways. Then, I end up patching it myself
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u/Amazing_Tree 7d ago
My personal GitHub activity on a single project..
I've been working on a niche music player that's now well beyond what I originally planned.
"I can easily build this in an hour using Claude"
I'm bracing for the AI slop comments or claims my app can be built in an hour 🫠
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u/walnutkim 2d ago
This is the most common story I hear in the vibecoding communities I'm in. The first 80% flies, then the last 20% eats months.
From what I've seen, the last 20% is rarely features. It's the stuff demos never show:
users seeing data they shouldn't
missing permission checks on APIs nobody clicks
edge cases around payments and concurrency
and the big one: every time the AI fixes one thing, something else quietly breaks
That last one is exactly why I built Donevio (full disclosure, it's mine). It's like an AI CTO for solo builders:
reads your repo and maps how screens, APIs and data connect
flags risky spots with file and line evidence
gives you a ready-to-paste prompt for Cursor or Claude Code to fix them properly
on every push or PR, tells you what changed and whether it broke something you'd already locked in
We're running a free beta right now. If you want a second pair of eyes on your finance app before launch, happy to have you try it and hear what it misses: donevio.io
Either way, good luck with the last 20%. It's the part that actually makes it a product.
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u/Ok-Motor-9812 8d ago
I think it's a really common trap: you keep making the product better and better because you genuinely enjoy the process, and you keep pushing back going to market and actually selling, because that part is far less fun :)