Leave the prototype

Vibe tools are for learning speed — not for pretending you have a product. Three exit criteria before you own code.

mine

written here

Concepthandbookproduct-buildingprototyping

Spin-out from AI-Native Product Building.

Claim

A vibe prototype is deliberate ignorance in service of speed. The failure mode is not leaving too early — it is staying until the demo becomes your identity while billing, auth, and Tuesday repeat-use remain unproven.

The three gates

Stay in vibe tools until all three are true:

  1. One paying or committed user — not a friend who said "cool."
  2. One workflow run ten times — you know the steps, not the demo path.
  3. One hard limitation the tool cannot carry — auth edge case, billing, compliance, performance, real data model.

Move to your own codebase when the next experiment is about reliability and revision, not whether the idea deserves to exist.

Pressure-test

  • Are you adding "one more screen" because coding feels heavy — or because the falsifier is still open?
  • Can you name what you learned as a checklist, not a screen recording?
  • If the vibe tool vanished tomorrow, what decisions would you still defend?

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