Why your vibe coded app only works in your head | Farouq Aldori
Anyone can generate an app now. You open Cursor, describe what you want, and out comes clean, well-formatted code. It even has comments. It runs, and the linter’s happy.
Except you didn’t. You built something that looks like an app but doesn’t behave like one. It ignores the messy reality of systems, users, failures, and edge cases. You haven’t tested it against the world.
The problem is, it feels real. The structure, the syntax, the polish all trick your brain into thinking the hard work is done. But you're seeing what the model guessed you meant. It’s pattern-matching, not understanding.
In the real world, writing apps is an interaction between what you think the system should do, what it actually does, and what you observe when you try to make it do that thing.
You write code, you run it, it breaks, you fix it. Through that loop, your mental model gets refined. You stop guessing. You start knowing.
