An external analyst thinks that vibe-coding traffic is falling off a cliff.
- An external analyst thinks that vibe-coding traffic is falling off a cliff.
- For example, a 50% decline for Lovable from June to September.
- Of course, external data is of very poor quality.
- But it does track to me as being plausible.
- It turns out that as a non-technical person you can't ship a production product even if the LLM writes the code for you.
- There's more to shipping a production app than writing the code.
- The clean up from "demoable" to "usable" (especially to make it not just usable but also safe) is a huge amount of work, that LLMs don't do a great job at unless you tell them to.
- You need to know to tell them to.
- Many of the vibe coded apps that succeed in the market get taken down by security issues.
- The Lovable founder responded with stats showing continued growth.
- But he did it in the most eye-roll-y, least-convincing way ever.
- No y-axis numbers or even describing what metric it's charting.
- That's an extremely easy signal to make misleading.
- Every PM worth their salt knows how to cherrypick data to give the appearance of momentum.
- You make the strongest case you can with the data you have.
- A weak case implies you don't have data that tells the story you want to tell.
- I didn't give the rumor that much credence until seeing that weak-sauce retort.