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Comment by culopatin | Hacker News Reader

Today a friend of mine connected me with his uncle who wanted to develop an MVP for his company. He claimed he didn’t want to distract his engineers on this project, but that “it shouldn’t take you more than 5hs to do this with vibe coding”. I promptly declined, if it takes 5hs why are you reaching out to me? It would take more than 5hs just to bring me into the loop of what you want vs your own engineers. If vibe coding is that good might as well DIY while you’re showering!

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These kinds of "clients" have always been around. If they want to tell me how long they think it should take, my answer has always been that they should do it themselves. If they say something like, "it shouldn't take too long," I said "send me what you need it to do." Then I look at that and ask "what if A, B or C happens? What if a user does X?" Make a list about 15 bullet points long of edge cases they hadn't thought of showing, the flaws in their business logic. (This, btw, is what I'd do if I were instructing an LLM as well). Then it's, "well, how long will that take?"

And my answer - like the best of car mechanics who work on custom rides - is: I don't know how long until I actually get in there, but minimum 5x what you think, and my rate is $300/hr. Is it worth it to you to do it right?

Usually the answer is no. When it's yes, I have a free hand. And having a few clients who pay well is worth a lot more than having a few dozen who think they know everything and are too cheap to pay for it anyway.

I have fully vibe coded several apps at this point (none professionally, but stuff I actively use in my life). One thing I don't think everyone understands is that it still takes time. I need to do countless rounds of testing, describing the exact problem I find, rinse and repeat again and again for hours and hours. I happen to enjoy this way of working and I do think it's faster than writing the code myself, but it's not fast.

I find that the main way it saves time is in situations where yes I know how to write code but I am looking to write something in a domain I’m less familiar with.

And regex.

++1

Yep agreed... It's a bit like sifting gold, most of what it produces is crap, but if you stay with it long enough and put in enough effort you will eventually have something that works well.

Part of the issue is that it is so fast to get to a working prototype that it feels like you are almost there, but there is a lot of effort to go.

> that it feels like you are almost there, but there is a lot of effort to go.

People made tools specifically to make templates look like templates and not a finished product, just because client was ready to push the product just after seeing real looking mockups of interface.

Us devs always (justifiably) complain how the PHBs of the world go all "looks great, now ship it" when presented a minimal prototype hacked together in a week, missing 95% of all the time-consuming parts. Apparently it’s easy to fall into the same trap even when you should know better…

> it is so fast to get to a working prototype that it feels like you are almost there, but there is a lot of effort to go.

Not too different in that respect from non-AI-assisted coding! The "last 10%" is always more like 50-80%.

Not only that, but the requirements are far more lax when it's your own project. In an enterprise setting on a 14-year old codebase (where this 80%-reduced-timeframe project lies), vibe coding doesn't work at all! PMs and managers simply do not understand the nuances of these tools.

If it's 5hs, why not distract his own engineers?

That's pretty much nothing ... to me that line indicates a whole lot of other possible things.

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