After vibe coding: how do you take your product to the next phase?
As a data engineer who has little experience in full-stack software development, I’ve been experimenting with vibe coding tools to move fast in the early stages.
My flow looked like this:
• Prototyped the main UI in V0 (after 300+ iterations/conversations back and forth)
• Added backend with Supabase for auth, storage, and DB
• Moved from Replit → V0 → now AI coding IDEs (Trae, Cursor) to push into full-stack territory
Vibe coding is great for speed and validation, but it has so many limits.
At some point, you hit that wall where you need real engineering depth, or risk staying in “prototype land” forever. If you barely have any development experience, it's hard for you to really scale your product to the market, or have 'serious' users (maybe enterprise users) commit to your product.
I know for some founders who come from totally non-technical background, AI coding IDEs are already a 'No'.
So I’m wondering:
• How do you make the leap from prototype to production when you start with vibe/no-code tools?
• For non-technical founders, what’s the smartest path to avoid being stuck at this stage?
Would love to hear how other founders navigated this inflection point.
Replies
I'm not a dev, but I can tell you how I approached this as I migrated from Bolt to something more scalable for me.
I built out what I considered to be a pretty robust prototype within Bolt including a Stripe integration for payment gateway, Supabase backend with Github and Netlify for code and deployments. I was also using Resend for email automations.
I started getting "project too big" flags from Bolt and despite trying all of its recommendations, I was basically stuck, so I had to find a better way and began researching next step solutions. I took this research to ChatGPT and had a game planning session to devise a pretty helpful step-by-step.
I don't need to get into the process, but effectively I pulled the plug on deploying from Bolt to deploying from Github/Netlify on my own and downloaded Cursor to begin cleaning up after myself and creating a new workflow.
Once I got comfortable using node and Cursor it was like I grabbed a new gear and my ability to iterate and squash bugs was amplified.
I only started using Bolt back in December so making this move was necessary to continue progressing in my learning process into this brave new world.
Honestly, the biggest mistake I made was trying to rebuild everything from scratch once I hit the limits of no-code. I ended up wasting about 3 months rewriting stuff that already worked fine. Looking back, a much better approach would have been just figuring out exactly which parts actually needed real code and leaving the rest as is.
And what really helped was bringing in one senior developer....not full time, just as an advisor. They looked at my prototype, pointed out what would scale and what wouldn’t, and helped me map out a clear plan.....and that one decision saved me a lot of time and unnecessary rebuilds.
Also, the hardest part was knowing when to make that jump. I stayed in prototype mode way too long because users seemed happy. But once bigger customers started asking technical questions I couldn’t answer, I realized I couldn’t avoid it any longer.