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Comment by KingOfMyRoom | Hacker News Reader

You have a great way of demystifying things. Thanks for the insights here!

Do you think a non-programmer could realistically build a full app using vibe coding?

What fundamentals would you say are essential to understand first?

For context, I’m in finance, but about 8 years ago I built a full app with Angular/Ionic (live on Play Store, under review on Apple Store at that time) after doing a Coursera specialization. That was my first startup attempt, I haven’t coded since.

My current idea is to combine ChatGPT prompts with Lovable to get something built, then fine-tune and iterate using Roo Code (VS plugin).

I’d love to try again with vibe coding. Any resources or directions you’d recommend?

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If your app has to display stuff, you have no code kits available that can help you out. No vibe coding needed.

If your app has to do something useful, your app just exploded in complexity and corner cases that you will have to account for and debug. Also, if it does anything interesting that the LLM has not yet seen a hundred thousand times, you will hit the manual button quite quickly.

Claude especially (with all its deserved praise) fantasizes so much crap together while claiming absolute authority in corner cases, it can become annoying.

That makes sense, I can see how once things get complex or novel, the LLMs start to struggle. I don't think my app is doing anything complex.

For now, my MVP is pretty simple: a small app for people to listen to soundscapes for focus and relaxation. Even if no one uses, at least it's going to be useful to me and it will be a fun experiment!

I’m thinking of starting with React + Supabase (through Lovable), that should cover most of what I need early on. Once it’s out of the survival stage, I’ll look into adding more complex functionality.

Curious, in your experience, what’s the best way to keep things reliable when starting simple like this? And are there any good resources you can point to?

You can make that. The only ai coding tools i have liked is openai codex and claude code. I would start with working with it to create a design document in markdown to plan the project. Then i would close the app to reset context, and tell it to read that file, and create an implementation plan for the project in various phases. Then i would close context, and have it start implementing. I dont always like that many steps, but for a new user it can help see ways to use the tools

That’s a good advice, thank you!

I already have a feature list and a basic PRD, and I’m working through the main wireframes right now.

What I’m still figuring out is the planning and architecture side, how to go from that high-level outline to a solid structure for the app. I’d rather move step by step, testing things gradually, than get buried under too much code where I don’t understand anything.

I’m even considering taking a few React courses along the way just to get a better grasp of what’s happening under the hood.

Do you know of any good resources or examples that could help guide this kind of approach? On how to break this down, what documents to have?

Maybe react native if you like react

Learning how to get it to run build steps was a big boost in my initial productivity when learning the cli tools

I've always wanted to make an app like this. I think you could do a lot with procedural generation and some clever DSP.

> Do you think a non-programmer could realistically build a full app using vibe coding?

For personal or professional use?

If you want to make it public I would say 0% realistic. The bugs, security concerns, performance problems etc you would be unable to fix are impossible to enumerate.

But even if you had a simple loging and kept people's email and password, you can very easily have insecure dbs, insecure protections against simple things like mysqliinjections etc.

You would not want to be the face of "vibe coder gives away data of 10k users"

Ideally, I want this to grow into a proper startup. I’m starting solo for now, but as things progress, I’d like to bring in more people. I’m not a tech, product or design person, but AI gives me hope that I can at least get an MVP out and onboard a few early users.

For auth, I’ll be using Supabase, and for the MVP stage I think Lovable should be good enough to build and test with maybe a few hundred users. If there’s traction and things start working, that’s when I’d plan to harden the stack and get proper security and code reviews in place.

One of the issues AI coding has, is that its in some ways very inhuman. The bugs that are introduced are very hard to pick up because humans wouldnt write it that way, hence they wouldnt make those mistakes.

If you then introduce other devs you have 2 paths, they either build on top of vibe coding, which is going to leave you vulnerable to those bugs and honestly make their life a misery as they are working on top of work that missed basic decisions that will help it grow. (Imagine a non architect built your house, the walls might be straight but he didnt know to level the floor, or to add the right concrete to support the weight of a second floor)

Or the other path is they rebuild your entire app correctly. With the only advantage of the MVP and the users showing some viability for the idea. But the time it will take to rewrite it means in a fast moving space like start ups someone can quickly overtake you.

Its a risky proposition that means you are not going to create a very adequate base for the people you might hire.

I would still recommend against it, thinking that AI is more like WebMD, it can help someone who is already a doctor but it will confuse, and potentially hurt those without enough training to know what to look for.

Really depends on the app you want to build.

If I'd use Vibe coding I wouldn't use Lovable but Claude code. You can run it in your terminal.

And I would ask it to use NextAuth, NextJS and Prisma (or another ORM), and connect it with SQLite or an external MariaDB managed server (for easy development you can start with SQLLite, for deployment to vercel you need an external database).

People here shit on nextjs, but due to its extensive documentation & usage the LLM's are very good at building with it, and since it forces a certain structure it produces generally decently structured code that is workable for a developer.

Also vercel is very easy to deploy, just connect Github and you are done.

Make sure to properly use GIT and commit per feature, even better branch per feature. So you can easily revert back to old versions if Claude messed up.

Before starting, spend some time sparring with GPT5 thinking model to create a database scheme thats future proof before starting out. It might be a challenge here to find the right balance between over-engineering and simplicity.

One caveat: be careful to run migration on your production database with Claude. It can accidentally destroy it. So only run your claude code on test databases.

Thanks a lot for all the pointers.

I’m not 100% set on Lovable yet. Right now I’m using Stitch AI to build out the wireframes. The main reason I was leaning toward Lovable is that it seems pretty good at UI design and layout.

How does Claude do on that front? Can it handle good UI structure or does it usually need some help from a design tool?

Also, is it possible to get mobile apps out of a Next.js setup?

My thought was to start with the web version, and later maybe wrap it using Cordova (or Capacitor) like I did years ago with Ionic to get Android/iOS versions. Just wondering if that’s still a sensible path today.

It’s great at design; you can also do it in Claude code chat ui and then when you are happy copy paste it to cli

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