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Is "AI vibe coding" making prototyping worse inside real companies?

16 points by arapkuliev ↗ HN
I keep hearing that prototyping is “solved” now — just use Cursor, Claude, Lovable, etc.

But when I talk to people inside real organizations (healthcare, regulated industries, even large non-tech companies), I keep seeing the opposite:

There’s no shortage of ideas. There’s a constant backlog of things people want to test — new workflows, internal tools, patient-facing flows, decision support UIs.

The bottleneck isn’t creativity. It’s: – internal IT teams focused on maintenance – engineers already overloaded – AI tools that still require time, context, and ownership – agencies/freelancers that are too slow or heavyweight for “just a prototype”

My hot take: AI didn’t eliminate the prototyping problem — it shifted it to the people who have the least time to deal with it.

Curious how this matches your experience: – Do you actually prototype continuously, or is it mostly one-off? – Have AI tools fully replaced the need for external help for you? – If you could get realistic prototypes in days (not months), how often would you use that?

Genuinely trying to understand whether I’m seeing a real pattern — or just a biased slice of the world.

5 comments

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codyklimdev
From what I've seen it's easier with vibe coding / LLM tools to get a prototype built, but it's more difficult to initially flesh that prototype out and begin proper product development. Of course the business doesn't know this, or care, so I think the impact it has on the business overall is fairly negative.
burnerToBetOut
I've never done vibe coding myself. But I've watched YouTube videos of some of the fanniest of vibe coding fanboys.

My take is that vibe coding IS prototyping. Nothing more. Nothing less.

There used to be an equally hyped up approach to writing software called Rapid Application Development (RAD). Again, a rose by any other name…

fathermarz
We built an MVP for a startup, then forked the front end to extend to the prototype vision of where we want to go. We use the prototype to dream and when we need to implement the front end of a feature we already understand how it would fit in to the product. Easier to scope.

One thing I have found coming from enterprise is, stakeholder design meetings get way more fun and much faster.

In enterprise, everyone gives notes and the designers take them away and put up another meeting to review days later. Usually with Figma screens people can review etc as things go.

Startup/Vibeland. Someone has an idea for a look and feel or UX solution. It’s like next to instant feedback. There is still the level of rebuilding it for real, but I find the iteration loops are much tighter.

drewsski
If a prototype has to wait for engineering to bring it to life, then perhaps the tools being used for the prototype are the problem, or the staff that is charged with their usage. At my company, prototyping now falls entirely on the design and product team, with occasional consultation with engineering usually to inquire about the technical feasibility of a proposed feature.

The product team has the closest proximity to end users, so they are well placed to validate ideas. The AI tools help them iterate much faster, which also translates to keeping customer focus groups engaged.

The tools will definitely get better with time, but they are still an order of magnitude improvement compared to the Figma based prototypes from the early 2000s.