Vibe Coding
Building real software by describing it to an LLM: the triumphs, the disasters, and the community rules.
On this page
"Vibe coding" means building real software by describing it to an LLM and shipping whatever comes out, with little or no traditional engineering discipline. The group is full of triumphs and disasters with this approach.
The triumphs
A non-exhaustive list of community-shipped apps built this way:
- The Megillah app: synced Megillah reading, broadcast mode, multi-language. Built in about ten days during Purim 2026, with feature requests merged live. Claude Code.
- Berel.me: a dozen or more micro-tools (grogger, raffle, dreidel, pdflabel, splitmyclass, sicha-stitcher, 12 Pesukim, autoprint, pushka tracker). Mostly Claude Opus 4.5.
- The Maamorim app: the Rebbe's maamorim, curated, with AI search and notes.
- Mishna.me: shareable mishnayos with osiyos hashem for shiva and yahrtzeits.
- Tzvi-to-Tzadik: a grandfather's poems to the Rebbe, with AI-powered source exploration.
- Rashi Roots Map / Atlas of the Sages: an intellectual-history timeline on Lovable.
- Tenpr.app: a maaser education tool built in Google AI Studio.
- Cypcampaign.lovable.app: an end-of-year campaign dashboard.
- Countomer: Sefiras HaOmer with a daily Daf of Sotah and location-based Tzeis notifications.
- Movers-referral-tool: NCOA results to nearest-Chabad-House referral emails, fully in-browser.
- Rebbe's Global Footprint: on Base.app, built in fifteen minutes.
The throughline: pick a small, specific problem, ship it, and iterate from community feedback within hours.
The disasters
"I kept adding pieces using AI tools. Each addition made the codebase more fragile. By the end, I had six different timing systems contradicting each other."
That was the post-mortem of learningtanach.org's Esther reader, which still drew 7,000 visitors in two days.
"AI coding is powerful, but incremental AI edits can quietly make the codebase fragile. Never release an AI-coded app with login functionality."
Specific failure modes the group has documented:
- Compounding fragility. Each AI edit fits the previous state of the code but does not reason about the whole. Architecture rots.
- Security blind spots. Vibe-coded systems with user accounts, payment, and AI-built backends are a recipe for credit-card and PII leakage.
- WhatsApp bans. Bots and bulk senders that route through personal numbers get accounts disabled, sometimes after months of working fine.
- Inability to import existing code. Lovable cannot ingest a real repo; for non-trivial work you graduate to Cursor or Claude Code.
The community vibe-coding rules
Do not vibe-code anything that:
- has a database,
- is user-facing with logins,
- handles financial transactions, or
- integrates mission-critical email.
For everything else, fine, ship it.
The toolchain shakeout (as of May 2026)
| Tool | Pricing signal | Best for | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lovable | Credits, about $25/mo entry | Fast prototypes, single-page apps | Cannot import repos; security review required before banking or CRM |
| Base44 | Cheap | Database-backed apps, quick MVPs | Less polished than Lovable |
| Bolt | Cheap | Similar to Lovable | None noted |
| Claude Code | Free with Claude Pro | Real engineering, GitHub integration | Learning curve |
| GitHub Copilot | $10/mo | Best value if you are already in an IDE | None noted |
| Cursor | $300 to $500/mo at heavy usage | A power tool | Expensive |
| Google Jules | Free | Phone-based prompting from GitHub | Newish |
| cto.new | Free, browser | Quick experiments | Less polish |
| Kiro.dev | Free preview | Desktop-app style | Beta |
How the safe ones stay safe
- In-browser, no server. The movers-referral-tool never persists user data, and neither do my-charity-box and countomer.
- No login. The dreidel raffle and grogger do not store accounts.
- Curated corpus, not generation. The Maamorim app and dach.dev expose pre-vetted text; the AI helps find, not invent.
- MCP or API into vetted backends. Hecher CRM and the Megillah app both connect AI agents to systems whose behavior is already correct.
Open questions
- When the Megillah app's live-broadcast mode has latency between phones, who fixes it? Single-maintainer projects carry a bus factor of one.
- How do we ship a Chabad-house CRM template that 200 shluchim can install without each one becoming a security incident? See CRM Automation.
- Vibe-coding's "shippable in fifteen minutes" appeal versus the maintenance cliff. No one in the group has solved this.
Related
- CRM Automation
- Megillah App Sprint, February 2026
- Community builders and apps (Lovable, the Megillah app, Berel.me) are catalogued in the Toolbox.