DEV Community: Onryo

Why Vibe Coders Need Bug Bounties

Onryo — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 17:46:24 +0000

Last week a founder DMed me on Twitter. He'd spent the entire weekend building a SaaS with Lovable. Dashboard, auth, payments, the whole thing. By Sunday night he had something that actually worked. Mostly.

But there was this one bug in the Stripe webhook flow. Payments were going through on Stripe's side but the app never updated. He spent two more days asking the AI to fix it. Each "fix" broke something else. By Tuesday he was ready to scrap the project.

I've heard this exact story dozens of times now.

The 80% Problem

Here's the pattern. Every vibe coder hits it eventually.

Getting from 0% to 80% is magic. The AI handles routing, UI, database, auth. You feel like a genius. You're building faster than you ever thought possible.

Then 80% to 90% gets frustrating. You hit edge cases the AI doesn't understand. It suggests workarounds that feel hacky. You start spending more time explaining the bug than it would take to fix it manually (if you knew how).

And that last stretch from 90% to 100%? Painful. One stubborn bug blocks your launch. You've been going back and forth with the AI for hours and you're no closer to a fix.

That last 10 to 20% is where projects go to die. I've watched it happen. You've invested real time, real energy, maybe real money on hosting and services. The AI keeps suggesting fixes that break other things. You can't afford to hire a full-time developer for one bug. And freelancer platforms take days just to get someone to respond to your message, let alone actually look at the code.

Why Bug Bounties Work

Bug bounties flip the whole thing around. Instead of hiring one person and hoping they're good, you post a bounty and multiple developers compete to fix it.

Think about why that's better for someone in your position:

Developers start working immediately. No interviews, no onboarding, no "let me review your codebase first and I'll get back to you next week."

Multiple hunters means you get the fix faster. And when people are competing, the quality of the submissions goes up.

You only pay when someone actually fixes it. Not for time spent, not for "investigation," not for a discovery call. Results or nothing.

And you describe the problem, not the solution. You don't need to know what's wrong technically. You just need to explain what should happen and what's happening instead. Let the expert figure out the how.

What Makes a Good Bounty

After seeing hundreds of bounties come through VibeFix, I can tell you exactly which ones get fixed fast and which ones sit there.

Specific problem descriptions win. "Login button doesn't work on Safari" gets fixed same day. "Auth is broken" sits for a week because nobody wants to spend an hour just figuring out what you mean.

Screenshots or screen recordings. Show the bug happening. A 30 second Loom is worth more than three paragraphs of description.

Steps to reproduce. How does someone trigger this? "Click login, enter any email, click submit, watch the spinner go forever." That's all a hunter needs.

What you've already tried. If the AI suggested five fixes and none worked, say so. It saves the hunter from going down the same dead ends and shows you actually put in effort before posting.

Platform and stack info. "Built with Lovable + Supabase" tells a hunter 80% of what they need to know before they even open the code.

The Free Tier Advantage

Not ready to put up cash? That's fine. VibeFix has free bounties where you stake VF Chips instead of cash. Developers earn XP and reputation for fixing your bug. You get your bug fixed. They build their profile. Nobody pays a dollar.

It's honestly a great way to test the platform before committing to a paid bounty.

Stop Being Stuck

Your app is 80% done. That last 20% doesn't have to take weeks. Post a bounty, describe what's broken, and let someone who's probably seen that exact bug before take a crack at it.

That Stripe webhook issue the founder DMed me about? A hunter on VibeFix fixed it in 22 minutes. It was a missing await on the database write inside the webhook handler. Fifteen characters of code.

Originally published on vibefix.co/blog

What is Vibe Coding? The Complete Guide for 2026

Onryo — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 17:30:30 +0000

Vibe coding is building software by telling an AI what you want instead of writing the code yourself. You describe the app in plain English. Tools like Cursor, Bolt, Lovable, Replit, and v0 generate the code for you.

Andrej Karpathy coined the term in February 2025. He described it as "fully giving in to the vibes" and letting AI handle the code while you focus on what the app should do. Collins Dictionary named it the Word of the Year for 2025.

And it's not a toy anymore. People are shipping real products this way. SaaS apps, marketplaces, internal tools, landing pages. Some of them making real revenue. But vibe coding comes with a very specific set of problems that traditional developers don't hit.

How Vibe Coding Actually Works

You open an AI coding tool. You type something like "build me a todo app with authentication, a Postgres database, and deploy it to Vercel." The AI generates a full codebase. React frontend, API routes, database schema, auth flow. Sometimes it even deploys it for you.

Here's what's popular right now:

Cursor is a code editor with AI built in. You write prompts alongside your code and it generates or modifies files. Best for people who know some code and want AI as a copilot.

Bolt (bolt.new) generates full apps from a prompt in the browser. No local setup needed. Click a button and you've got a running app. Best for non-technical founders who want something fast.

Lovable is similar to Bolt but the design quality is noticeably better. Cleaner UI out of the box. Popular with people building customer-facing apps.

Replit has an AI agent that builds and deploys apps in their cloud IDE. Good for prototyping.

v0 by Vercel generates React components from prompts. More focused on UI than full apps.

The workflow is surprisingly fast. You can go from zero to a deployed app in an afternoon. That's not hype. I've watched people do it. The first 80% happens in an hour.

The 80/20 Problem

Here's where it gets real.

The AI gets you to 80% fast. Then the last 20% takes longer than the first 80%.

You hit a bug. You paste the error back into the AI. It tries a fix. The fix breaks something else. You paste that error. It reverts the first fix. Now you're going in circles. Three hours pass and you're further from working than when you started.

Sound familiar? This is the universal vibe coding experience. Doesn't matter which tool you use. The AI is great at generating code from scratch but struggles with debugging its own output in context.

The bugs that trip people up most:

Auth redirect loops after deploying. Works in preview, infinite redirects in production.
Database connection failures. The AI generates a connection string for local dev that doesn't work in production.
Hydration mismatches in React/Next.js. The server-rendered HTML doesn't match what the client renders.
Environment variable issues. Missing or misconfigured env vars that the AI assumed would exist.
Payment integration failures. Webhook signatures that don't verify, test/live mode confusion.

These aren't edge cases. After triaging 200+ bug reports from vibe coders, these same 5 categories cover about 70% of all issues.

Who is Vibe Coding For?

Three main groups.

Non-technical founders who have a product idea but can't code. Before vibe coding, their options were hiring a developer ($5K to $50K) or learning to code (months). Now they can build an MVP in a weekend.

Developers who want to move faster. Plenty of experienced devs use Cursor to generate boilerplate, write tests, or scaffold new features. They know code but don't want to type it all.

Indie hackers and side project builders. People who want to ship fast, validate ideas, and don't need enterprise-grade code quality. Speed matters more than architecture.

The common thread? They care about the product, not the code.

What Vibe Coding is NOT

It's not no-code. No-code tools like Bubble or Webflow give you a visual builder with limited flexibility. Vibe coding generates actual source code you can read, modify, and deploy anywhere. You own the code.

It's not pair programming with AI either. Pair programming implies you're writing code together. Vibe coding means you're not writing code at all. You describe, the AI builds.

And it's not a replacement for knowing how software works. The best vibe coders have enough technical intuition to know when the AI's output is wrong, even if they can't fix it themselves.

The Debugging Problem (And What to Do About It)

This is the single biggest pain point in vibe coding. The AI that built the code can't always fix it. You end up in a loop:

Error appears
Paste error into AI
AI suggests a fix
Fix breaks something else
Repeat

I've watched this pattern play out hundreds of times. Here's what actually works:

Start with the error message, not the symptom. "My app doesn't work" gives the AI nothing. "TypeError: Cannot read properties of undefined (reading 'map') at line 47 in Dashboard.tsx" gives it everything.

Provide the full stack trace. Copy the entire error from the browser console or terminal, not just the first line. The relevant information is usually in the middle.

Isolate the problem. If the bug started after a specific change, tell the AI exactly what changed. "This worked before I added authentication" is way more useful than "authentication is broken."

Know when to stop. If the AI has tried 3 different fixes and none work, you're probably dealing with a bug that needs a human developer. The AI's context window is full of failed attempts at this point. It's going to keep suggesting variations of the same wrong approach.

That's exactly why we built VibeFix. When the AI can't fix it, post the bug as a bounty and let a developer who's seen this error before pick it up.

The Future of Vibe Coding

It's moving fast.

A year ago, the generated code was fragile and the tools were limited. Now you can build production apps that handle real users and real payments.

What's changing:

Better context windows mean AI can reason about larger codebases
Agent-based coding (Cursor's agent mode, Replit's agent) can run multiple steps on its own
Specialized models trained on specific frameworks produce fewer bugs
Community knowledge is growing. Debugging guides, common fix patterns, shared solutions are filling in the gaps

But here's the thing. The tools will keep getting better at the initial generation. The debugging problem is harder to solve because it requires understanding the specific context of YOUR app, YOUR infrastructure, YOUR use case. That's inherently harder than generating code from a prompt.

Vibe coding isn't going away. It's going to become the default way most software gets built. The people who figure out how to handle the debugging gap? They're the ones who actually ship.

Originally published on vibefix.co/blog/what-is-vibe-coding