been shipping software for 10 years. spent the last few months building real stuff (not todo apps) on every vibe coding platform i could get my hands on. Cursor, v0, Replit, Bolt.new, Lovable, Windsurf, GitHub Copilot, Base44. actual projects with auth, APIs, real users.
quick takes:
Cursor is the best AI code editor out there right now imo. fits into your existing workflow, doesn't try to replace you. if you're an experienced developer this is probably already your daily driver.
v0 by Vercel. went in expecting a toy, came out impressed. generates clean React + Tailwind components. the Design Mode is actually good. hard to justify not using it for frontend work at this point.
Bolt.new. fastest thing for prototyping. i validate ideas here in 30 min then move to real tools.
Replit. their AI Agent has gotten really good. idea to deployed app without leaving browser. 40M+ users for a reason.
Lovable. great for MVPs if you're non-technical. but i've watched too many founders hit a wall once things get complex. vibe coded it, can't maintain it. classic.
Copilot. respect what it started but Cursor passed it for me. Windsurf. capable, not differentiated enough yet. Base44. easy to use, closed ecosystem makes me nervous.
ok but here's the thing nobody talks about:
we're generating code 10x faster and testing hasn't caught up at all. i vibe coded a full-stack app in a weekend. looked great. broke everywhere in production. auth flows broken, APIs failing silently, UI states that shouldn't exist. roughly 45% of AI-generated code has security vulnerabilities apparently. that number should scare people more than it does.
the next big thing in this space isn't another code generator. it's whatever solves end-to-end testing for vibe coded apps. that's the gap.
what's your vibe coding stack? have you hit the "works in demo, breaks in prod" wall? how are you dealing with testing?
curious where everyone's landing on this.
Jenson Miller
“Instantly calculate your age, date differences, and time with MyAgeCalculate.com
I like Replit. It is easy to create anything and you can BYOAK.
solid list. been using Cursor + Claude for about 4 months now and honestly can't go back to vanilla VS Code. agree that v0 is underrated, the React components it spits out are cleaner than what half my team writes manually lol.
I vibe coded an internal tool last month, looked perfect, then a user entered a special character in a form field and the whole thing ran into a 500 error. :/
Interesting breakdown. I’ve noticed the same pattern while experimenting with a few of these tools. They’re amazing for getting something working quickly, especially for prototypes or small utilities, but once you move toward production the real challenge becomes reliability and testing.
The speed of generating code has definitely outpaced how we validate it. I’ve had cases where everything looked fine during development but weird edge cases started showing up once real users interacted with it. Feels like the workflow now is less about writing code and more about verifying what the AI produced.
I’m curious too what tools or practices people are using to close that testing gap, because that seems like the next big bottleneck.