Vibe Coding Gets You to 70%

I had some version of this conversation with three clients this week. So it's time to write about it.

Someone with a real business problem opens a vibe coding tool and starts building. A compliance workflow. An estimating calculator. A complex trip planner. Something they've been doing manually, with too many steps and too much room for error.

And what they build is impressive. Decision trees. Branching logic. Real workflows that reflect how their business actually operates.

I love that people are doing this. The curiosity. The initiative. The willingness to just jump in and figure it out. That instinct is exactly right.

Then they hit a wall. Dead links. Data that won't persist. Features that work alone but fall apart when connected. LLM outage. One client put it perfectly: "I kept painting myself into corners and trying to back out."

Vibe coding gets you to 70%. Fast. Cheap. Remarkably so.

The last 30% — security, data persistence, reliability, maintainability — is where businesses live or die.

You can't rely on a system that isn't built to be reliable.

That's not a knock on the tools. It's a knock on the assumption that you can skip the 30%.

The thing most people miss is that the prototype isn't wasted effort. It's the most valuable phase. You proved the idea. You mapped the workflow. You discovered requirements you didn't know you had. A good developer inheriting a well-thought-out prototype saves weeks compared to starting from a blank page. Get a developer on speed dial for when you're ready.

The prototype is the requirements document. That's the unlock.

Celebrate that you built it.

Rose Thun is the founder of Design Rosetta, where she helps organizations navigate AI adoption without losing their minds.