Maybe people don't cite specific apps because they like their jobs, and outing apps as vibe-coded is still seen as negative

I personally know of two completely vibe-coded large apps in my professional environment. One by a non-technical manager, made to solve his needs, then sold to customers. Initial development went along great, but by now velocity has greatly slowed down. Also took a lot of engineering hours (of actual software developers) to get permission management from "chaotic and ineffective" to passable. It's still worse than what you would have gotten by just using a couple sentences of the right technical language at the start. Deployment is also a bit of a nightmare. All in all, anything beyond the first rollout phase was delayed by months. Honestly it should have stayed as a prototype that then gets rebuilt from the ground up. But still, it is a real app, making real revenue

The other example was vibe-coded by a software engineer in his free time. Works pretty well, doesn't have too many bugs. Makes some revenue, but a lot less. Solving manager problems just sells better.

> Honestly it should have stayed as a prototype that then gets rebuilt from the ground up.

And that’s a natural process for many products. In the journey from discovery to prototype to MVP to product, it should be rebuilt multiple times.

Particularly with LLM’s to assist, the process of rebuilding from a new context and understanding of the desired goal requires even less effort.

The hardest part is managing any real users, their expectations, and any data / workflows they’ve come to require from what came before.

I vibecoded a Postman/Insomnia API tester program, and I use it everyday at work now.

But as another software engineer, I remove myself from that comparison, because the idea is to find out if a non technical person can do the same, that's the definition of vibe coding.

> Maybe people don't cite specific apps because they like their jobs, and outing apps as vibe-coded is still seen as negative

... or IDs apps as cr*p is still seen as negative.

A friend of mine, non-technical, is not making money with his apps. But he's creating a street fighter like game. Just for fun.

So there's that.

He can't exactly release it because he uses a lot of copyrighted stuff. It's also meant only for himself. Though, I've been asking if I can play it, it looks fun.

I think we desperately need to start differentiating between "is creating" and "has created". I have a couple of "am creating" projects too, but their proximity to "have created" is directly proportional to how much effort and expertise _I_ am bringing, not so much related to the AI's contribution.

I run into this quite a bit. We have users generating MANY apps at our small company (30 FTE), entirely with Claude. It's great to see people mess around and tinker. It's NOT great to see someone with a GH repo that has 750+ commits for what would be MAYBE 1 week of a developers time. SO these are non-developers now spending hours and hours working on software that is probably going to get thrown out.

We're in this spot where we don't know when to cut our losses on projects like this. (Is it even viable as production software? Does it currrently do what it's supposed to, or are they adding new features? Is there a return on continued development efforts?)

None of these apps they have built are seeing any major usage, and I don't think a single one is what I would call "done" (There was a gold rush stage at the beginning of 2026 where senior leadership wanted everyone to spend some time messing around with Claude). Unfortunately, they never told anyone when to stop messing around with Claude, so the ROI is ever diminishing.

Update: he's done with it now. It's quite a fun game. He has some game balancing to do still as I button mashed through the 2D fighting game.

I’m afraid this isn’t surprising anymore.

Plinq.

Plinq was made on Lovable, https://www.aieatingtheworld.com/articles/non-technical-foun...

Couple more on https://buildthedamnthing.com/resources/articles/case-studie...

The problem with lovable, from someone with insider knowledge, is that many of the apps existed even before appearing there and where ported to the platform to ride the hype wave.

Wow, I am not sure that I want my safety app to be videcoded by someone without experience

I don’t think we’re talking about this kind of website.

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That was kinda harnessed and prompted by a team of security experts, so there's that.