Ask HN: Any example of successful vibe-coded product? Many people talk about vibe-coding and about the different ways to use this development "methodology" successfully. I wonder though if anyone really managed to push to production anything that has been fully or almost fully created through LLM assisted coding. Do you have anything to share, whether you or someone else created it? Possibly something more complex than a static webpage. |
It's not commercially successful (it's a side project), but still represents a complete project.
I'm pretty familiar with the underlying stack, which helped a lot since I knew the pitfalls. But pretty much all of the code is written by an LLM.
https://github.com/pannous/goo (1% handwritten go extensions)
Is it different for Claude?
"I need a plumber in Austin who can come this week" "Looking to sell my MacBook Pro" "I'm offering piano lessons for beginners"
That's literally all you have to say.
Our AI understands what you need and connects you with people who can help. No endless scrolling. No complicated filters. No frustration.
Just speak your find.
https://apps.apple.com/au/app/calmshows/id6749471333
ios and web app and openapi spec
https://alexjacobs08.github.io/lobsters-graph/
(i built this in search of a lobste.rs invite if anyone willing and able sees this--email in my bio :)
Its been very decent so far. Time will tell if the PMF is there for the MVP, but thats on the product, not the AI generated code slop.
FYI, this was more of a hobby horse + learning project than an "enterprise SaaS requiring SOC2 compliance." I am basically building a toy. So far, I have learned that you can ship code toys very quickly to test a market demand with an MVP.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/ai-slop-canvas/dogg...
I think it's decent complexity for something where I didn't even write one line of code. (all Claude Code)
It was entire built by ChatGPT and Cursor, with me only providing the guidance, without writing any code.
I use the app daily, as I've included it in Windows startup and don't ever turn it off.
You can see more about it here and even download a release of an older version: https://github.com/Vatroslav/spotify-auto-skipper
I have found that the initial specs only go so far; as I use, "what's missing" becomes clearer.
Workflow is build -> checkin to git -> build container -> deploy to Cloud Run. I have a number of instructions for Claude for logs, frontend, backend, logging etc. based on my past experience. Note that I am mostly a backend developer (AWS, Azure, GCP); I can't code frontend to save my life and on that front, the agents are helping me realize ideas rapidly.
And, again, I'm not a coder and only know the absolute basics of programming. This is not something I would have been able to do without AI assistance.
There's also the fact that many programmers working on software today both big and small use AI to one degree or another, maybe not to program the whole thing from scratch, but definitely to help ease the process. It's an invaluable tool.
I'm write a few articles here about tricks that work for me when it comes to AI assisted coding: https://foundinglean.substack.com
I've got some users and the stuff I can do each time I start doing vibecoding is astounding. Obviously 50% the work is just fixing what the AI didn't understood or imagined too much, but having a good AGENTS.md is key (and patience from me) - so that's why I'm buidling LynxPrompt indeed, for having an easy way to own a good AGENTS.md file for my next projects... and hopefully you too.
I cloned Paddle's NextJS starter kit[1] and incorporated my previous reporting code built with Observable Framework[2].
It actually took longer to get the website (domain, terms, privacy) approved by Paddle and my identity verified by its 3rd party than to vibe code the site with Claude Code.
I have rebuilt it a few times in agent mode while trying to get pmf. I used about 22B tokens this year
I think it meets the brief - has a supabase backend, fairly complex workflows (inngest) etc. Too early to say "successful" but in production! I welcome questions & feedback
"Vibe coding" and "AI-assisted coding" are NOT the same.
There's a spectrum of AI use from none to full (vibe coding).
Claude Code is probably the best known example of a product claimed to be coded with AI-assistance to the point of much of it being autonomous now guided by experts. My experience is that is now the norm for many senior engineers and it's certainly the future. I don't know any that are truly vibe-coded but I would imagine plenty of mobile apps.
It's simple but i wouldn't have bothered if it wasn't a 10minute "Hey Claude create a ..." job. Having programmed a Reddit bot back in 2014 for xwing miniatures it took me several days to create it back then.
It’s a suite of tools to navigate the Epstein files—it even made it into the news!
Here’s the HackerNews discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46339600
Since launching in November, more than 50 people are regularly using it. Two are actually medium-big (~200 personnel) enterprise companies.
https://github.com/rabfulton/ChatGTK
I'm sure the code can be critisized, but I'm happily using the application I wanted that did not exist having never programmed python in my life.
Funny also how Loveable and the like are hiring engineers like crazy, yet think engineers are not needed anymore. Why not just vibecode Loveable itself? Oh wait I can tell you why.
Some types of programming benefit more from AI tooling than others. For example, prototyping seems to be the most fruitful area. Also, writing small utilities is much easier, to the extent that a two hour job would now take only a few minutes. That's where you get the multiplier posts from.
But working in a large codebase using proprietary libraries is not a solved problem for AI (yet).
It's just that the average engineer does not spend all of their time on things that can be sped up.
Speeding up 1% of your time by a factor 20 simply does not help very much. But for some roles, I'm sure that a 10% net increase in productivity is realistic.
I didnt join them because I dont really want to do all the work that comes with owning a business like the accounting. mostly the accounting. i also dont particularly want to be maintaining an extra couple of systems at present. there mught be vibe coding currently, but not vibe operations
they should have the thing up by june at their very slow rate of building with lovable, but theyre not people who would ever frequent HN.
Ive even noticed fortmatting bugs that are seemingly identical on two different websites lol
It's telling that they will put their own applicants through a dozen rounds of stringent technical interviews, Leetcode exercises, use anti-AI assistance tools and pay their staff $500K or more, all for something they advertise as being easy to vibe code away.
I've built products that solve my problems and have released one, Intraview.ai -- it's functional, solves a real problem for me and my customers.
That said, as a business goes, it's not a sensation but it's gone from idea to customers using it in less than 6 months. Is it a VC hit, no -- am I happy with where it is and how fast I'm learning -- absolutely!
Aggregator for finding things to do with kids in Finland.
At a family gathering was asking a relative how his beginner level programming course was going. Was blown away to learn that he had just vibed this and now had already a steadily increasing stream of traffic. I had already used it myself.
I’ve done ~10 rides with it so far. Hoping I can convince my wife to use it and save myself $50 a month. That would be my most successful side project by a wide margin.
There are probably a lot of examples like this. Vibe coded software people made for themselves, and other people could use it if they wanted.
All of the code was reviewed by myself, and I’m a programmer, so not sure if that fits the description. I didn’t go through it with a fine-toothed comb, however, and 90% of the review was on my phone. I also did some non-vibed setup for hosting, db, email, etcetera.
To me vibe coding is not looking at any of the code at all, but the definition reads a little loose to me these days, especially on HN, as: did an LLM “type” most of the code or did you? Either way I don’t think the term or definition is a big deal and probably not worth splitting hairs over.
When it comes to cycling I’m a complete novice which is why the workouts have resistance as % of total (what peloton does) and I recently added an option where you can switch to relevant effort in settings.
I appreciate this comment because I didn't know what people typically did for creating their own workouts and recently learned about FTP. I'm going to look into this!
There are several interesting projects around peloton hacking that have served as inspiration:
- [0] Peloton android app side loader: https://github.com/doudar/Openpelo
- [1] Overlays metrics on the Peloton: https://github.com/selalipop/grupetto
- [2] Bookmarklet to overlay cadence/resistance on web classes (this is what I started with): https://gist.github.com/rocng/2ff577948569ce0764b8938687841b...
- [3] Decodes Peloton metrics from the serial port: https://github.com/ihaque/pelomon
- [4] Transform Peloton into a smart trainer: https://github.com/doudar/SmartSpin2k/
These can be used in combination to use your Peloton with Zwift. Groupetto and Pelomon are really interesting. I'd like to integrate with something like Groupetto and use OpenPelo to have the full experience on the Peloton itself. That's kind of the end game, but I think the web app is the most approachable and easiest to get started with -- at least for me.
I've lately seen a trend where people use their phone to instruct agent on the cloud to build applications. I presume this is beyond having RDP on your phone
I try to keep my instructions pretty targeted so there aren’t too many LOC and files changed. That’s the goal at least.
I deploy on Vercel, so I get a preview build link I can click in the PR and try the site before I merge to main (trunk based). I use Supabase so if there is a DB migration I just run it in the Supabase console by copy pasting the SQL.
When I merge the PR it deploys to prod. This works pretty well for me.
You may not have looked at the landing page: https://www.skidmarks.club
I also work at Stripe and will be recommending that we migrate our CPQ off of Salesforce for various reasons (agent force is butt, platform limits are silly in 2025 - 6 meg max heap size for a backend transaction?????).
Greatest feeling ever
Database migrations and anything related to calculations have had a fair bit of hand holding. Beyond tests it writes I do still test by hand for confidence.
It’s coming up to a year of use. Claude Code credits has still not exceeded the cost of a paid product. I don’t count my time here because this doubles as keeping my technical side busy, and it’s been enjoyable.
I also built a solution for myself that was largely vibe coded. The underlying schema for inventories, batches, orders, cultures, etc was done in advance to help guide Claude along with documentation, but I'd guess 75 percent of the code is pure Claude.
It has worked really well for a while now. Since it's just me using it and I'm able to roll with issues it causes or verify outputs on the fly if I want to, it's totally fine not being super polished. It meaningfully increases my productivity by allowing me to manage things in a way that fits my mental model and business.
Like you, the cost of the project has been less than a subscription. And the subscriptions wouldn't even do what I needed.
The "Methodology" that made it work: We moved from initial idea to production in four weekends while I maintained a full-time role. The key was moving past "chaotic vibes" and treating different LLMs like specialized team members: A) Strategic Layer (Gemini Pro): Used for architectural decisions (React/Vite, Node/Express, PostgreSQL/Prisma) and product prioritization.
B) Execution Layer (Claude Code): Used for heavy lifting—implementing the cron jobs, refactoring API patterns, and writing the test suite.
C) TDD as the Guardrail: We never "just coded." Every AI-generated feature followed a strict Test-Driven Development cycle using Vitest. If the tests didn't pass, the code didn't go to production.
The result is a stable system serving 200+ active users with a codebase that doesn't feel "schizophrenic" because we maintained strict cognitive boundaries and context documents for the AI to follow.
It is 100% vibe-coded/AI-assisted. I'm just trying to layer actual engineering discipline (TDD, proper DB migrations) on top of that workflow so it doesn't break when actual parents use it. Thanks for the feedback.
My experience so far has been if you possess both deep domain-specific experience and significant coding experience then these coding LLMs, and most notably Opus 4.5, are the greatest productivity booster in the world.
The latter is partly what I was getting at regarding domain expertise because with that expertise comes an industry network. AI is great but if you’re creating solutions in search of a problem then the code doesn’t matter because nobody will need/want your product. I feel like your chances of success are much higher if you’ve personally felt the pain your product intends to solve, and that pain is built into the domain expertise people accrue over a long period of time.
From my experience, the biggest difference between vibe-coded projects that go somewhere and the ones that don’t isn’t code quality, it’s whether the builder keeps talking to users after the first version. The “vibe” gets you to ship, but iteration discipline is what turns it into something real.
https://aldi-prices.lawruk.com/ https://github.com/jimlawruk/aldi-prices
I was trying to test the theory if it's even possible to release something production grade with vibe coding. Wrote about the experience here https://kau.sh/blog/container-traffic-control/
One is Solo Launches, a Product Hunt–style platform for solo founders where you can launch your SaaS for free. I built it in ~15 days as a self-taught dev. It’s live, used by real users, and started making revenue recently (~$100+ in December, verifiable on TrustMRR). https://sololaunches.com
While growing it, I focused a lot on distribution and SEO. By submitting it to relevant directories, I managed to increase its DR noticeably. That process later turned into a second small product, listmy.site, where I help others get similar directory-based backlinks. https://listmy.site
Both are fairly simple full-stack apps, but they’re in production, have real users, and generate revenue — mostly built with LLM help + iteration. Happy to share more details about the stack or workflow if useful.
Happy New Year
I've never seen anything like it since the original days of the game "The Island of Dr. Brain" released in the early 90s.
I.e. the problem is a lot of time spent on moving the pieces off-of each other. While this is more pleasent in real-life tactile space, not as much fun when using the computer to have to click-and-drag all the pieces around (of course, sorting them etc, is up to the user, but just some kind of initial "see all the pieces in the space without them overlapping each other to the greatest extent possible depending on the total space avaliable given the current zoom settings" ...
The Shuffle button actually tries to spread the pieces out to cover the current zoom level, but it can still result in some of them being obscured. I'll look into implementing a more even distribution.
Allows diabetics to easily get carb estimates for their meals by just snapping a picture. Free for now, would love some feedback.
I built the basic idea in like 2 days using Google Antigravity. It's all serverless on Google cloud run and uses Google for auth, doesn't store any data. MVP while I am working on the marketing and testing.
I used a similar concept I originally used to train my son (9yo) to be better at counting his carbs with a custom GPT. But that idea didn't work for others to use. Most people don't know what a 'custom GPT' is, so explaining it was difficult. Web-apps everyone gets, it has PWA support so you can save it as an 'app' on your phone.
I am a software engineer so it's already in my wheelhouse and it just costs me the tokens right now so it's cheap to run.
Would love feedback or questions if anyone wants to know more.
spocklet-pomodo.hf.space/
I created it as a single main.go with just a single main dependency (gorilla websockets iirc) and I think It's pretty successfull between me and my friends and I am not thinking of monetizing it ever
There is also https://spocklet-beta-pomodo.hf.space/ which has some more features to make it more user friendly that I got suggestion for so yeah
I made it out of complete frustration and the first prototype was built in <30 minutes but I guess I won't really take credit of it because I am just pleasant that I can now use such a software and perhaps other might too.
I don't know but I am very gloomy about AI mostly but prototyping in domains I don't know too much about to create a "just good enough" for my own use case is the only valid use case I find of it I guess.
Problem statement: given a start date and a bible book / chapter, produce a reading schedule for the remainder of the bible assuming one will read 3 chapters every day and 2 extra on Sunday.
So assuming an input of "2025-07-06 Genesis 1," the list would read "Saturday, June 6, 2025: Genesis 1 (3 chapters) \n Sunday, June 7, 2025: Genesis 4 (5 chapters)..." etc.
It created the types, data structures, and utility functions required, and even isolated the schedule generation to a function that used all of them ... and that function was busted. It printed the same book and chapter and date every line.
With a little elbow grease I was able to bring it home. Saved me an hour.
My friend vibe coded the entire app to generate thumbnails for YouTube videos.
Another application I have built is Remotedays (remotedays.app), which is a compliance tool for Luxembourg based companies to track cross border workers. This is recently finished and starting to reach out initial customers. There is a demo for this app is available in public at demo.remotedays.app
I have used Claude Code and Google Antigravity IDE. The Antigravity is used whenever I exceeded the Claude limits (which happens often). If you have an architecture about the product in mind, you can clearly use these tools as force multipliers. In my experience, Claude is the best, especially when you use it with the skills.
Most of it was written by Claude Code. It even created the extension's logo (in SVG). Link: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/great-filter/mbifgf... Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s50bI_O5tps
I've also created a more real "app" at https://www.hunchle.com, which is a trivia app. It was a real challenge since LLMs hallucinate all over the place, and given labs are benchmaxxing, it gives me a real good idea for how good LLMs really are.
I also built a Preview Pane Handler for 10-bit videos.
The installers (WIX) were vibe coded as well.
So was the product website and stripe integration. I created a bespoke license generation system on checkout.
I don’t think I wrote a single line of C++ code although the WIX installers and website did receive minimal manual adjustments.
Started with Claude but then at some point during development Codex got really good so I used only that.
https://blazingbanana.com/work/whistle - Whistle, which is a complete free, offline voice transcription app using whisper, available on all platforms, Linux, Mac, Windows (with CUDA builds), Android (and iOS as soon as my dev account goes through, who knew paying Apple £79 would be so hard!). To be honest the packaging part was probably the toughest bit and all the different ways each platform needs to build. - Probably my most "successful" one, at 450+ downloads on the Play store.
https://formait.app/ - Free offline document formatting using LLMs to take a load of unstructured notes and give you a nice PDF output. You can load any GGUF model you throw at it as it's implementing llama.cpp, but uses Phi-4 out the box. It's actually quite a useful combination with Whistle, so thinking of integrating voice to text in at some point. This is available on all platforms (except mobile) with CUDA builds available too.
100% of the code I produce now is written by this framework. I am working on several projects that will be in production shortly (and have done this before without AI).
I also use it to index websites and manage nanobanana prompts. So it’s production ready for me.
It's a website to read and analyze the Rig-veda.
It's not fully "vibe coded" but lots and lots of AI usage.
After a while, you hit a maxima where the LLM can't really add anything without breaking something else. You are always limited by what you know (which if you fully vibe coded the thing, then it's nothing?). You can get a bit farther by decomposing parts of the app into react components but after that you are stuck.
In real life, any clearly "vibe-coded" product was practically a shit-show especially in terms of UX. You can see the UI but things are quite unstable/unreliable. I have yet to see a fully vibe-coded product that actually works.
Tangents (https://tangents.chat) is an Angular/Nest/Postgres app for thinking-with-LLMs without losing the thread.
- Branch: select any span (user or assistant) and branch it into a tangent thread so the main thread stays coherent.
- Collector: collect spans across messages/threads into curated context, then prompt with it.
- You can inspect a "what the model will see" preview and keep a stored context-assembly manifest.
Vibe-coding aspect: about 600 commits and about 120k LOC (tests included) and I have not handwritten the implementation code. I do write specs/docs/checklists and I run tests/CI like normal.
What made it workable for something larger than a static page:
- Treat the model like a junior dev: explicit requirements plus acceptance criteria, thin slices, one change at a time.
- Keep "project truth" in versioned docs (design system plus interface spec) so the model does not drift.
- Enforce guardrails: types, lint, tests, and a strict definition of "done."
- The bottleneck is not generating code, it is preventing context/spec drift and keeping invariants stable across hundreds of changes.
If you define "vibe coding" as "I never look at the code," I do not think serious production apps fit that. But if you define it as "the LLM writes the code and you steer via specs/tests," it is possible to build something non-trivial.
Happy to answer specifics if anyone cares (workflow, tooling, what breaks first, etc.).
Makes life much easier
I think the main issue is maintaining sterile conditions but its doable.
The technique for creating clean plants from infected plants is really cool and remarkably simple. You typically take tissue from the part of the plant called the meristem, where cells are actively dividing and less likely to be infected, then rapidly disinfect and transfer the tissue to a sterile culture.
It seems like it should be such a sophisticated and complex process, but all you're doing is cutting a chunk of fresh cells out and popping it into some goo where it can continue to grow.
Extracting meristem tissue is usually the only difficult part. They can be extremely tiny. It takes a sharp eye and very steady hands. I've only done it for practice, never out of necessity. I'm pretty bad at it.
It seems kind of like magic if you ignore the biologal machinery. It makes perfect sense why it works, yet it's also absolutely crazy that it does.
I culture plants which are popular in aquariums and terrariums. It's a nice way to get a break from software and science where I spend my days, get my hands dirty, enjoy refining different skills, make some money, and meet different types of people.