I've Been Vibe Coding for a Year. Here's What Nobody Tells You.

#vibecoding #saas #startup #productivity

I've Been Vibe Coding for a Year. Here's What Nobody Tells You.

Everyone's shipping with AI now. But the narrative is wrong about who actually benefits.

"Vibe coding" is everywhere. Cursor, Claude, Copilot — founders are shipping real SaaS products with minimal hand-written code. The indie hacker discourse has shifted from "learn to code" to "just prompt your way to an MVP."

I get it. The productivity gains are insane. I've seen it firsthand.

I've been in digital for 15 years — graphic design, web dev, SEO, agency co-founder, now building multiple SaaS products solo near Milan. I use AI to write code every single day. It's not optional anymore; it's how I ship.

But after a year of building this way — shipping ListingVid (AI video for real estate), OhMyLead (lead gen for indie hackers), and EST8 (a real estate CRM) — I think the mainstream take on vibe coding is missing something important.

The thing nobody says out loud

AI doesn't erase the experience gap between developers. It multiplies it.

The founders I see winning with vibe coding aren't the ones with no technical background. They're engineers and builders with years of shipped projects who now have an extra pair of hands that never sleeps.

Here's why experience still matters:

You know what to ask. A well-structured prompt isn't magic — it requires understanding the problem deeply enough to describe it precisely. Ten years of debugging trains that instinct. Beginners don't know what they don't know, so they accept mediocre output.
You catch the wrong turns fast. AI hallucinates. It writes confident, plausible, broken code. If you've spent time in production, you spot it. If you haven't, it ships.
You know when to stop building. The hardest product decision isn't "how do I implement this?" It's "should I implement this at all?" That judgment comes from having built things nobody used.

None of this means beginners can't ship. They can, and they do. But there's a ceiling — and experience is what breaks through it.

3 takeaways

AI is a multiplier, not an equalizer. Your existing leverage determines how much you get back.
Learn fundamentals anyway. Not to write CRUD by hand — but to develop taste and catch AI mistakes.
The real moat is judgment. Knowing what to build, for whom, and when to stop is not something you can prompt for.

The best founders I know using AI tools aren't moving faster because the AI is doing the thinking. They're moving faster because they've already done the thinking — for years.

If you're building with AI, I'm curious: do you find your background helps you get more out of it? Drop a comment or find me at @lmoncany.