The Vibecoding Explosion and the Production App Problem

Everyone's building faster than ever. So why aren't there more successful products?

The Paradox

2024-2025 has seen an absolute explosion in development velocity. AI coding agents like Cursor, Claude Code, Devin, and Windsurf have made building 10-50x faster. Solo founders are shipping in weekends what used to take teams months.

Yet successful production apps haven't increased at the same rate. Not even close.

If building got 10x faster, why didn't we see 10x more successful products? Why are graveyards of abandoned side projects growing faster than the number of profitable SaaS companies?

The answer is simple: We solved the wrong bottleneck. We optimized for execution speed in an era where execution is no longer the constraint.

What Actually Happened

Let's look at the data (anecdotal but widely observable):

Notice what happened? The velocity went up 30x. The volume went up 10x. But the success rate went down.

More projects. Faster builds. Fewer winners.

The Real Bottleneck Wasn't Building

Here's what we got wrong: We assumed that building was the constraint. That if we could just code faster, we'd ship more successful products.

But building was never the bottleneck for product success. Product judgment was.

The hard parts of building a successful product were always:

• Knowing what to build
• Understanding who needs it
• Validating demand before investing resources
• Identifying hidden risks and assumptions
• Choosing the right features to build first
• Knowing when to pivot or kill an idea

AI coding agents made the easy part (building) even easier. But they didn't make the hard part (product judgment) any easier at all.

In fact, they made it harder. Because now you can build 10 bad ideas before breakfast instead of one.

The Cost of Fast Failure

"Fail fast" sounds great in theory. Build quickly, test with users, iterate or kill.

But here's what actually happens in the vibecoding era:

The opportunity cost is massive. Each failed idea isn't just time building—it's time not spent on the right idea. It's learning the wrong lessons. It's burning out on a treadmill of shipping features nobody wants.

Fast failure is still failure. What we need is fast validation.

Enter: AI Product Taste

Product taste has always been the secret weapon of great founders. It's the ability to see which ideas have legs before building them. To smell bullshit in your own assumptions. To know when to double down and when to cut losses.

Traditionally, product taste took years to develop. You'd build a bunch of products. Most would fail. You'd spot patterns. Eventually, you'd get good at predicting what would work.

AI product taste is different.

Instead of learning through expensive failures, you learn through fast, cheap simulation. AI personas tell you how real users would react. Pre-mortem analysis surfaces the risks you didn't see. Pattern recognition shows you what works and what doesn't—before you build.

You compress years of hard-won product judgment into weeks or months. Not by building more, but by validating smarter.

How AI Product Taste Works

Cutline accelerates your product taste development through four mechanisms:

Bridging the Gap: Vibecoding + AI Product Taste

Here's what happens when you combine vibecoding velocity with AI product taste:

This is the future. Not building more, but building better. Not failing faster, but validating faster.

The explosion of vibecoding gave us the ability to build at unprecedented speed. AI product taste gives us the ability to build the right things at that speed.

Together, they finally unlock what we thought AI coding agents would give us: an explosion of successful production apps.

The Path Forward

If you're vibecoding today, ask yourself:

• How many projects did you start this year?
• How many made it to production?
• How many have paying customers?
• Could you have predicted which ones would work before building them?

If the numbers don't look good, you don't need to code faster. You need to validate smarter.

That's what AI product taste gives you. Not another tool to build faster, but a system to build right. Learn more about why I built this and the problem it solves for vibecoding founders.

Because in the vibecoding era, product taste is the only sustainable competitive advantage.