What You Can Actually Build With Vibe Coding

The question I get most — usually with a sceptical eyebrow — is: “Okay, but what can you actually build with vibe coding? Real things? Or demos?”

Fair question. Here’s my answer as a list of URLs rather than opinions. Everything below was built by one person with the workflow and stack described on this site, and is live right now.

Games — including 3D with real physics

Dolphin Beyond is a physics arcade game — ride a dolphin from the ocean to space — running in the browser and on the App Store, built with React Three Fiber and a physics engine. Quiz Fight is an iOS trivia game with over 500,000 AI-generated questions. HeadToHead lets friends predict football results in private mini-leagues, with live fixture data.

Games were supposed to be the thing AI couldn’t help with. Half true: AI writes Three.js scenes and game logic shockingly well, and is useless at game feel — that part stayed human.

SaaS with real complexity

TaskMondo is the least demo-like thing I’ve built: tasks, CRM, booking and email in one workspace. Multi-user data, permissions, offline sync, calendar logic — the unglamorous plumbing that separates products from prototypes. Vibe coding didn’t remove that complexity; it let one person get through it in reasonable time.

LostLead is an AI product in itself — it digs through forgotten DMs and finds the customers you should have answered. And Dealer ID serves a niche B2B audience of watch dealers. Niche B2B used to be economically impossible for solo developers; the build cost killed it. That math changed.

Data pipelines and AI products

Nuze publishes a daily edition of ten stories ranked by how widely the world’s newsrooms cover them. Behind it is a pipeline reading around a million articles a day across 64 languages. That’s not a weekend project pretending to be infrastructure — it’s queues, dedupe, ranking and cost control, vibe coded piece by reviewable piece.

A GPS sports game, because why not

Runish turns real runs into an async game drawn over Mapbox. Native GPS quirks, background location, map rendering performance — the kind of integration work that used to mean “hire a mobile specialist.”

So where’s the ceiling?

Honest version: the ceiling isn’t a type of software — within reason — it’s a type of situation.

• Anything whose acceptance test is a feeling (game feel, brand, tone) needs human iteration. AI accelerates the loop; it can’t score it.
• Anything security-critical needs a human who actually understands the permission model. Non-negotiable.
• Anything you can’t judge is a bad idea to build on vibes. My products cluster around my stack because that’s where my judgment is sharp. Vibe coding extends your reach from your foundation — it doesn’t replace the foundation.

The pattern across all of it

Every product on this list follows the same arc: AI compressed the distance from idea to working software, and the remaining work — taste, structure, testing, cutting scope — was mine. That division of labour is the whole thesis of why I vibe code.

What can you build with vibe coding? Anything you could specify and judge. Which is both an enormous unlock and a very precise description of the remaining job.