Have any successful startups been made by 'vibe coding'?

Question

A couple of years ago, there was slowly growing hype around 'no code' tools, which some claimed may one day replace tradition software development (i.e. programming). Despite a reasonably extensive search, I couldn't find a single successful SaaS or software startup that was made using 'no code' tools.There were stories of people validating their idea using 'no code' i.e. building a very crude version of their startup quickly, and deeming 'no code' very useful because the benefits of fast idea validation outweighed the downsides of 'no code' (e.g. inextensible design, UX deficiencies, 'toy app' feel etc).Fast forward to today, there's a lot of hype around 'vibe coding', which can make existing devs more efficient. But have there been any cases of someone who couldn't previously code being able to make a successful start up by way of 'vibe coding', if so, who/what?

belter · Accepted Answer

The founder...An LLM...is too busy shopping for their new yacht to reply to you...

jdsully · Answer

[delayed]

spicyusername · Answer

Anyone who regularly uses LLMs to produce code knows that vibe coding anything larger than a to-do app is not currently realistic.
Once your codebase reaches the size needed to solve actual business problems, the quality of the output varies wildly, the complexity of the prompts required to produce useful code increases, and the output code requires significant editing to actually integrate without bugs or errors.
My personal opinion is that for vibe coding to be viable as the complexity of feature requirements or the size of the code base increase, the specificity and complexity of the input prompt will eventually demand more from the engineer than just writing the code, since code is more specific by definition than natural language.

simonw · Answer

I've heard of a few SaaS apps that were vibe coded by non-programmers, some of which are generating revenue.
I've also seen incidents of those apps turning out to have security holes you can drive a truck through, and hiring professional help to move beyond their origins.
(I didn't keep notes of the companies and I don't want to specifically call any out, but they exist.)
I'm hoping this is a relatively short-lived trend. I think vibe coding tools for personal use and prototypes is to be celebrated, but vibe coding software that other people will depend on or even pay for is deeply irresponsible.

Joeboy · Answer

In reality, when people talk about "vibe coding" they're probably either being self-deprecating (if it's their own work) or snarky (if it's somebody else's).I've made a couple of things lately that I sometimes tell people are "vibe coded" because they were heavily facilitated by LLMs, but it's not really true in the pure, literal sense.

alecsm · Answer

What I've seen is mostly small apps and people that claim they're making thousands of dollars every month with them.
And they usually try to sell you their courses/mentorships.
I don't know if I'm being suspicious because they seem fake or because they came out of nowhere and are earning in a month what I make in a year.

neilv · Answer

The dominant strategy right now might be to be skilled enough to do your job, much more effectively than "AI", but product-wise hop on the hype bandwagon of selling "AI" tools to people who are bad at their jobs.

awongh · Answer

Pure speculation, but people have suggested that the iOS app Tea was vibe coded. (Based on the quality of the code and the founder's stated background)

dzink · Answer

Building own tools if you do something that makes money has been more reliable than building for public consumption.

MangoToupe · Answer

I don't think vibe coding has been around for long enough to produce a "successful startup" even under the most optimistic interpretation. Furthermore, the code is only a slice of what a startup is. And not even a very large one.

dboreham · Answer

"Vibe-funding"

dataviz1000 · Answer

My comment is more about what to expect in the next 12 months.
I've been using VSCode's Copilot with Claude Sonnet 4 and find it to be terrifyingly competent running 8 hours a day costing ~$10.
I am developing techniques to keep it moving forward producing code and fast. First, prompt engineering like "write clean, simple, and elegant code." Second, I use TypeScript script very strictly which helps. Third, the models are amazing at producing very simple test units which will be important in the fifth. Fourth, I use techniques like "look for opportunities to refactor pure functions in the file and put them at the top of file" or "look for opportunities to refactor pure function and put them in shared utils.ts file." Fifth, every hour or so, I will have the agent simplify and clean the code and with complete test coverage both unit and integration as longs as they all pass .... good to go.
This is a process and it is the same every time. So now I'm thinking about how do I write code to automate these steps into an automated process. For example, I keep using the same pattern of steps to solve hard debugging problems which I'm going to leave out of this conversation now. If I can create a process in code, I'd be one step closer to complete automation coding.
The patterns are emerging. I strongly believe in 12 months these systems are going to be able to write extremely complicated programs with very little input from the human in the loop.

AstroBen · Answer

Can you define vibe coding? I'm seeing it used for anything from not even looking at the code to writing long detailed specs for the LLM and then heavily reviewing its outputIf it's a non-programmer trying to build a non-trivial software product with AI I haven't heard of anyone successfully doing that and I'm very confident in saying theres no chance it'll happen with todays AI

firefax · Answer

MySpace's glitz was partly due to poor input sensitization. They tried to weed out things like tags while leaving folks the ability to rewrite the HTML on their pages.

xadhominemx · Answer

Maybe maybe not but given the pace of improvement of the foundational models and tooling, seems like something that will be possible quite soon.

boombapoom · Answer

idk there was that one dating app that got hacked...

neom · Answer

I got an advert served to me for Lovable yesterday, it contained various screenshots of folks from twitter saying they are at $XXX,XXX MRR on some vibecode app they built on lovable, not clue how real that is but they looked like real screenshots (could be some folks BS'ing for clout tho)

Mabusto · Answer

There seems to be an army of people on Twitter making $100k MRR from AI Tinder photo enhancer apps and they have a course to sell you.This is the same brand of person that was excited to get rich off NFTs and has now just moved on to slapps (AI slop apps).Vibe coding is fun and great for personal projects or bootstrapping, but the specificity of the prompts needed to effect the change you want grows exponentially with the code base size to the point where you do just need to code it yourself and use the AI as a helper.

renewiltord · Answer

Pieter Levels has made lots of money doing this.

herval · Answer

Lovable was (is?) heavily vibe-coded AFAIK. Allegedly there&rsquo;s a lot of 1-2 people startups making good money out there, and those were likely impossible without vibe coding (they&rsquo;d take much more time to build)The &ldquo;toy app&rdquo; feel is really not a big problem if you put some effort into it. It&rsquo;s very easy to see landing pages made with a one-shot request on Cursor, but if you put some effort into adjusting things, you can get to pretty good design in a fraction of the time.To be clear, my position is &ldquo;vibe coding&rdquo; _must_ include _some_ level of coding by hand (not entirely prompting an AI), at least with the current generation of tools.Another tidbit, in my personal experience, is that lovable & co are enabling completely non-technical people to push out hot sites, marketing material, etc (including simple interactive experiences, for instance) quite flawlessly and quickly. This would require a dedicated engineer at least, in the past. It&rsquo;s what the &ldquo;no code&rdquo; promise of years past was supposed to enable (IMO it didn&rsquo;t, webflow/etc are clunky and hard to use even for non-coders).

mkw5053 · Answer

My stack lately has been Next.js with Prettier and very strict lint, type, and complexity gates, plus opinionated tests that aim for real signal over mere coverage theatre.I want to find the time to fine-tune GPT-4o using before/after examples of code that fails the gates and then passes them. The hope being it generates gate-compliant code on the first try much more often, which is cheaper and more reliable than relying on a base model with brute-force retries. I think this might also align with research showing that grounding models in execution feedback yields order-of-magnitude gains in sample efficiency and improved code quality, not just speed [0][1].References[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.04349[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.02089

andy99 · Answer

There was the whole thing about the app for relationship pdiscussions, "Tea" I think, being apparently vibe coded and lacking proper security, leading to a data breach.More generally, I think vibe coding has replaced lots of mockups and demos for startups. There is really zero excuse to show slides or figma now in am early product demo. There are definitely startups succeeding on this basis, as in getting funding and signing up customers.If success means being profitable and running stable software, I don't see vibe coding as currently able to carry a company all the way through, but it's definitely part of the journey now.

tropicalfruit · Answer

> Me: Claude, write an app that predicts the future minute by minute using quantum states.> Claude: Sure! (proceeds to instantly vomit out a react crud app where none of the buttons do anything)

tommy_axle · Answer

One way to gauge is by taking a look at some of the projects submitted for Bolt's contest at https://worldslargesthackathon.devpost.com/project-gallery

sublinear · Answer

No.

cholantesh · Answer

Great post; I'm reminded of how firstly 'no-code' was often used adjacent to 'low-code' in blogspam and press releases, but also how the only shop I've ever worked in that used such a tool had an ever-expanding team of devs building stuff with it, as opposed to the non-technical users it was supposedly meant to target.

rich_sasha · Answer

Builder.ai /s

simonsarris · Answer

https://www.post-bridge.com/ by Jack Fricks was mostly(?) made via vibe coding.Note there's a small core set of features and then relentless refining going into the product after that. I think products that require the opposite, a relentless expansion of features vs tightening bolts may be much more doomed.