HorrorVC | AI Confessions

my app got approved for an accelerator, I dont know how to code lamo

I thought I was almost done and then someone told me I need to 'handle GDPR compliance' for my European users. I'm a personal trainer in Phoenix, my app tracks sets and reps. GDPR is a European law and Europe has found my rep tracker? WTF!

I'm paying $47/month for hosting, $29/month for the email service, $19/month for the analytics thing, $12/month for the form builder, and $20/month for the AI subscription I use to maintain it. Revenue last month: $0.

coding used to be a skill. now it's just vibes. I say this as someone who just shipped their second app. yolo lfg

Went from zero to $15K MRR in 11 months without a single line of code I personally wrote. The app has bugs. Customers report them. I fix them by asking Claude. My churn rate is low. My stress level is very high. But we are growing, baby!

design background here. i can tell when a site was built with v0 or lovable before i even scroll. theres a texture to it or an energy. like sourdough from the same starter

hired as a 'senior dev' at a startup. they don't know 90% of my output is Claude Code with me directing it, sorry ORCHESTRATING. delivered sprint after sprint, got employee of the month, got a raise, the code runs fine, the tests pass. this is the job now and based on my expectations I'll be able to completely replace myself with an avatar

I WAS THE VP OF ENGINEERING. I PUSHED FOR VIBE CODING AND CONVINCED THE CEO. I SAID IT WOULD CUT OUR RUNWAY IN HALF AND IT DID. WE SHIPPED FASTER THAN EVER AND THEN WE LAUNCHED AND EVERYTHING BROKE AND WE LOST OUR THREE BIGGEST ENTERPRISE CUSTOMERS IN TWO WEEKS. I was walked to my car by security on a thursday afternoon. dont be me

This is totally "made up" story. Sold my saas for 2.1 million, buyer from singapore did six weeks of due diligence - analytics, revenue, churn, blah blah blah, very thorough. Never once asked how long it took to build (3 days + Claude code lol). I told it what I wanted and deployed whatever it gave me. Never read a single line. The entire backend is raw unreviewed AI output. I signed the deal in a room with nine people and I havent stopped shaking since

ok so funny story. i used GPT-4 to build a trading bot. gave it full access to my binance account. told it to "be aggressive." it was. lost 34k in 11 hours. the bot was doing something with leverage i still dont understand. support told me it was working exactly as designed. bro i had designed nothing, you did that. i had just typed words into a chat box and connected it to my life savings.

A codebase used to be a record of decisions. Now its more like... a record of conversations. The decisions live somewhere else or nowhere. I find it funny

For the previous 6 months I've been driving in Uber and vibe coding on my phone, damn I feel I'm so close to release, my balls are tingling

Psychological difference between writing the code and approving the code is larger than I expected it to be. I feel that I get a bit dumber and I can't do anything about it and I'm scared as fuck but I can't stop because everyone is racing.

the weirdest thing about vibe coding is when you read something the AI wrote and its actually clever. like you cant tell if its clever or just wrong in a way you cant see yet. that uncertainty lives rent free in my head. this and a thought that I'm just dumber than i thought

My app went live yesterday. It has a homepage, a waitlist form, and a pricing page. I sent the link to 12 people and 3 of them actually signed up. This is real traction. Posting my journey to 10K users starting now.

people keep asking me what my tech stack is. I don't actually know, the AI just chose it. does that matter? its so over for old devs

I sold my idea to two investors for 15k combined before I'd built it. They keep asking for updates. The app doesn't work. I've been managing their expectations for nine months. This is not what I thought building a startup would feel like.

Im so fucking tired of all of this AI stories, its like back in crypto 2021 again, I left it for AI and now I feel exhausted as I was back then

The app works but every time I add something new it breaks two other things. I've been in this cycle for five months. I fixed the calendar, broke the payments. Fixed the payments, broke the login. I genuinely don't know if this can be fixed or if I need to accept that it can't.

The API rate limiting logic that Codex generated was wrong in a very specific way: it rate limited per API key, but the keys were rotating automatically. Effectively no rate limiting at all. Our competitor found this. They scraped our entire product database through the API over one weekend. Every user, every listing, every piece of proprietary data we had. We found out because they launched a competing feature using data that could only have come from us. We have no legal recourse because the data was technically public via the API.