Vibe Coding: Ship Fast, Fix Later (Your Code Can Be Ugly, Just Make It Work)

Question

Most side projects die in localhost purgatory—not because they’re bad ideas, but because we waste weeks over-engineering before validating them.

I used to do this too—until I embraced vibe coding.

What’s Vibe Coding?
Popularized by Andrej Karpathy, it’s simple: Use AI to turn ideas into functional code at ludicrous speed—even if it’s messy. The goal? Ship first, refactor only if people care.

This approach helped me launch:

ProfanityAPI (now used by a game studio)

Multiple #1 Google-ranked tools

Projects that later raised funding

Why It Works
Users Want Solutions, Not Clean Code
Nobody checks your git history before using your app. If it works (even barely), you’re ahead of 90% of unfinished projects.

Speed = Feedback = Survival
The faster you ship, the sooner you learn if your idea sucks—saving you months of wasted effort.

The Real Tech Debt? Building Something Nobody Wants
A "perfect" codebase with zero users is infinitely worse than a messy one with real traction.

My "Anti-Stack" (What I Skip Early On)
No auth – Use localStorage or nothing.
No relational DBs – Upstash Redis (schemaless + serverless).
No payments – Validate demand before monetizing.

Tools I Use to Ship in Days
Cursor (VSCode with AI superpowers)

v0.dev (AI-generated UIs in seconds)

LinkTrim – For quick, trackable sharing

For a detailed breakdown, check the README.md of my projects—I document every messy-first-then-fixed evolution.

Try This Today
Pick an idea.

Give yourself 48 hours to ship anything functional.

Post it on Twitter/Dev.to with #VibeCoding.

Pro tip: If you’re embarrassed by V1, you’re doing it right.

Want more? I write about shipping fast, AI-assisted dev, and side-project growth on my Substack.

*(Drop your best "ugly but shipped" story in the comments!)_

Comments

You are right when say 'users want solutions' that's true, but also you have to be patient when using LLM like ChatGPT because when the project become complex or large it become so rude, I have experience with ChatGPT that I explain very clear what I want, how i want it, share example code, and it comes with stupidities, pure hallucinations that what do is damage the code or cause more bugs.

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I agree with Elmer, Vibe can work on small or short life-span apps but if you dont build strong framework, you will deal more hours to fix existing code rather than adding new functionalities.