Vibe Coding Will Make You Feel Like a God. Then It Won’t.

Source: Dev.to

I’m a PHP backend developer. For years I had this quiet frustration: I could build anything on the web, but I’d never built software. A real app. Something you install, something that runs on your phone, something that isn’t just a response to an HTTP request. I didn’t have time to learn Swift. I wasn’t going to spend six months on Android fundamentals. I had a job, a life, and a backlog of ideas that were slowly dying in text files.

The Dream That Got Unlocked

My idea was simple: a collection manager for games, movies, anime, and TV shows. All in one place. Offline. Shareable. No subscriptions. I knew I couldn’t write a single Flutter widget from memory. I didn’t care. I opened Claude Code, described what I wanted, and started.

And here’s the thing nobody warned me about: it worked immediately. Not perfectly. Not without friction. But on day one, I had something running on my screen that I had described out loud an hour earlier. That feeling — I don’t have a better word for it than euphoria.

For the first time in years, I was building something that wasn’t a website. The thing I’d told myself I’d never have time for. The excuse I’d used so long it had become a fact — “I’m a web developer, that’s just what I do” — evaporated in an afternoon.

One Month, Every Day

I worked on it every day for a month. I released it. I wrote articles. I posted everywhere I could think of.

The Quiet After

It didn’t come. Not a disaster. Not a flood of “this sucks.” Just… moderate interest. Some upvotes. A few kind comments. GitHub stars trickling in slowly. No wave, no moment, no validation proportional to what I’d put in.

Not because I was surprised the product didn’t go viral — I knew the niche was crowded. Letterboxd, MyAnimeList, Backloggd — these exist and have audiences. I understood that going in.

What I hadn’t prepared for was the emotional math: a month of daily excitement, followed by a week of average reception. The ratio felt wrong even when my brain knew it wasn’t.

What Vibe Coding Actually Sells You

Here’s what I think now, a few weeks out:

• The dream it sells you has two parts, and only the first one is guaranteed.
  • Part 1: you can build it. True. Completely true.
  • Part 2: the euphoria of vibe coding comes from collapsing the distance between “I have an idea” and “the idea exists.” What it can’t do is collapse the distance between “the thing exists” and “people care about the thing.” That gap is the same as it’s always been. Distribution, timing, luck, market fit — none of that changes because you used an AI to write the code.

The Part I Don’t Regret

Here’s the honest ending: I’d do it again. Vibe coding gave me the app. It couldn’t give me the audience. I mixed those two things up — not because I’m naive, but because the process is so intoxicating that it’s easy to forget they’re different problems.

If you’re thinking about starting a vibe coding project: do it. Just be honest with yourself about which part of the dream you’re actually chasing. If it’s the building — you’ll get that, guaranteed. If it’s the audience — that’s a different project entirely, and it starts after the code is done.

Tonkatsu Box is the app I built — free, open source, MIT license.