Vibe coded apps

Vibe coding — describing what you want to an AI and shipping whatever comes out — turned a lot of people who weren't programmers into people with a live web app. The interesting question isn't whether that's real engineering. It's what actually got shipped.

What they look like in practice

The pattern across the ones that survive contact with users is consistent. They are small, they do one thing, and they were built because the person building them wanted the thing to exist.

• ◆Single-purpose: one job, one screen, no dashboard nobody asked for.
• ◆Browser-only: no install, no app store review, no native build.
• ◆Built in days rather than quarters, which means they're allowed to be weird.
• ◆Usually free or a few dollars — the economics only work because they cost almost nothing to make.
• ◆Often abandoned. The ones that aren't got used by someone other than the maker in week one.

Where it falls over

The build is the easy part now, which relocates the problem rather than solving it. The failures we see aren't code failures: no one can tell what the app does from its homepage, the thing was never shown to anyone, or it launched once into a feed and then disappeared. Distribution didn't get faster just because building did.

The free-first promotion playbook →

Live examples from the wall

These are real listings on theappwall.com right now, ordered by the clicks they've earned. 2 apps have squares; 31 clicks have been sent to them so far. The numbers update as people click.

1. 1
   
   thinkdrop.io

   Brainstorming that doesn't die in a Google Doc.

   19 clicks
2. 2
   
   ohship.lol

   Your app think it's special. The Internet disagrees.

   12 clicks

See the whole wall →

If you've vibe coded something

Ship it somewhere permanent before you ship it somewhere loud. A launch post is gone in a day; a listing is still there next year, still being crawled, still collecting clicks. That's the entire argument for the wall: $5 once, one square, kept forever, and it climbs on clicks rather than on who had the biggest launch day.