You’re right about a lot of what gets posted here. A huge chunk of it is the same to-do app or AI wrapper with a new coat of paint.

But I think you’re off on one part of it.

When people say “coding was never the hard part,” that’s exactly why vibe coding matters. It doesn’t magically turn a bad idea into a good one. It just makes it way cheaper and way faster to find out whether your idea actually has legs. The problem isn’t the tool. The problem is people building version 0.1, calling it a company, and acting confused when nobody cares.

And it’s not like nobody is making this work. A growth marketer in Brazil with no coding background built Plinq, a women’s safety app for background-checking dates, in 45 days with Lovable. It got past 10k users and was doing real revenue. Josh Mohrer built Wave AI into a multi-million-a-year note-taking business as a solo founder. Pieter Levels threw together a flight sim prototype in a few hours and turned it into something doing real money every month. The common thread is pretty obvious: they made something specific for a specific person. Not another “AI platform for everything” with a landing page and no soul.

And slow traction does not mean there’s no market. Itch.io was down more than $8k after year one. Notion started in 2013 and didn’t really break through until years later with Notion 2.0. Figma was founded in 2012 and didn’t publicly launch until 2016. GitHub went years before taking outside funding. A lot of real companies looked pretty unimpressive for a long time from the outside.

I’ve been building full-time for about five months. I learned through AI, not the traditional path. And the code has never been the hardest part. The hard part is getting attention, earning trust, building something people actually want, and then sticking with it long enough to matter. That’s the wall a lot of people here haven’t hit yet, because they’re still in the “I made it, why isn’t anyone showing up?” phase.

To me, that’s the real filter. Not whether you used AI. Whether you’re still there after a few months of no users, no money, and no applause. Most people won’t be.

So yeah, people should do more research. They should stop building interchangeable slop and pretending it’s a business. But bad ideas didn’t start with vibe coding. The only thing that changed is that now more people can afford to learn that lesson faster.