In my previous article, I Tried Vibe Coding And YouTube Lied To Me, I talked about my own failure with vibe coding. Since then, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the causes of that failure. This time I want to go a step further and dig into why vibe coding is structurally bound to fail.
I want to make one thing clear before we start. I am not saying you should avoid vibe coding. I am still coding and building my own products today. We have reached an era where you can build services even if you do not know how to write software, thanks to tools like Claude Code and Cursor. Productivity has definitely gone up. But the point I want to make is that this efficiency can actually become poison. This is exactly why many beginner developers like myself end up failing.
I dug into this recently, and there is no single clean dataset that tracks it precisely. But what shows up consistently across every founder community and app store trend I follow is that the number of released services exploded after AI lowered the difficulty of coding, while very few of those services actually survive. The number of failed services has grown just as fast as the number of new ones. Let me walk you through the new pattern of failure that vibe coding has created.
The Vanishing Filter
We need to look at the structure first. Building a service used to take a long time. It required months of planning, months of development, and months of testing. That long stretch acted as a natural filter. During that process, you would ask yourself dozens of times if anyone truly needed this. You held exhausting meetings and constantly validated your ideas through those discussions.
This is basically how QuickLink happened to me. I had the idea on a Friday night, and by Sunday morning a working prototype was already live. Things are different now. You come up with an idea at night, and by morning a prototype is ready. A landing page goes live the next day, and it hits Product Hunt three days later. This speed itself is not the issue. The real problem lies in what disappeared as things got faster.
The very first thing to vanish was friction. You used to have to hire a developer or learn to code yourself to build a service. That discomfort naturally made you ask if you were doing the right thing. There is no discomfort anymore. You can build something the moment you think of it. Validation disappeared right along with it.
The Output Addiction
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| The dangerous dopamine hit when your AI generated UI actually works |
This is the core problem of vibe coding. You become addicted to the output. The sheer experience of building something gives you a hit of dopamine. When a UI appears on the screen, buttons work, and features get added, you develop the illusion that your product is going to succeed. But that is not a signal of a good product. It is just a signal that you built something.
I will show you how this failure pattern plays out. This is the same pattern I went through myself. It starts with an idea. It usually begins with a personal inconvenience you experienced. You assume there must be many people like you since you found it inconvenient. You start building immediately based on that assumption.
Then you skip the market research. To be more precise, you pretend to do market research. You look up competitors on Google, find two or three complaint posts on Reddit, and conclude that there is demand. That is not market research. That is confirmation bias. You just found what you wanted to believe. I fell into this too. My idea felt so precious to me that I only looked for posts from people who needed it, and I finalized my decision based on that alone.
The Feature Creep Trap
So what happens to a service built like that? You launch it and hear nothing but silence for days. The conclusion most people, including myself, reach at this point is predictable. We ask ourselves if our marketing was weak or if we lacked enough features. But that was never the issue. The reality was that nobody wanted to pay money to solve that problem in the first place. This is the essence of vibe coding failures. Building a service that works technically and building a service people actually pay for are two entirely different things.
There is one more trap waiting for you. It is called feature creep. When there is no reaction from the market, you start adding more features. You add them recklessly, thinking people are not using the app because a specific feature is missing, or that they will definitely use it if you add one more thing. Adding features is incredibly easy in a vibe coding environment. You just tell Claude to add a feature, and it happens instantly. So features nobody ever asked for keep piling up. The product becomes complex, the core value gets blurred, and still, nobody uses it.
It is a painful realization when you spend weeks perfecting features only to hear crickets after launch. I broke down why this happens, and how to avoid the trap of building in a vacuum, in my previous piece on Why Your Great Product Is Getting Completely Ignored.
Selling Before Building
The root of the problem comes down to one thing. We start building before validating the idea. So what should we do? We have to sell before we build. This is not a new concept. Lean Startup talked about this years ago. But it has become even more critical in the era of vibe coding. As the speed of building increases, the importance of validation rises right alongside it. The easier it gets to build, the higher the chance of building the wrong thing.
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| The most important tool for validating your SaaS idea |
How do you actually validate an idea? The most powerful method is this. You call ten potential customers directly. I am not telling you to send Instagram direct messages or run surveys. You need to get on the phone and ask them if they actually experience this problem. Those ten conversations are more accurate than six months of market research. You get to feel exactly how painful that problem really is.
Getting on those calls is the hardest part for most developers because our instinct is to just keep coding. If you want to understand why shifting your focus away from the code editor is mandatory today you should read my thoughts on Why AI Made Selling Harder Than Building.
The Only Real Signal
There is another rule to remember. It is not validation until you receive money. Hearing phrases like "it sounds good," "I think I would use it," and "that is interesting" means absolutely nothing. People say nice things because they do not want to hurt your feelings. Swiping a credit card means more than a thousand compliments ever could. My own QuickLink app is a live example of this right now. A few friends told me they loved the idea, but not one of them has actually paid for it yet, and that gap between what people say and what they pay for is exactly the lesson I am living through as I write this.
Actions like upfront payments, waitlist registrations, and beta feedback requests must happen to prove actual demand.
As I said earlier, I do not view vibe coding negatively. Speed is a genuine asset. The problem is pointing that speed in the wrong direction. Building an unvalidated idea fast is just failing fast. Building a validated problem fast is another story altogether. I believe that is the true power of vibe coding. You must find the problem first, do the market research, validate the demand, and only then start building.
If you keep these steps in mind before you build your next product, you will realize that the true power of this era belongs to those who have the courage to ask for money before a single line of code is ever generated.
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