First of all, hello everyone—some of you may have seen my TE perfomance posts on Reddit.
I’m really happy to be here and to join a community like this.
Lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of projects on Reddit related to our devices; frankly, many of them are still in a rough, unfinished state, yet the developers still slap a $10 or $20 price tag on them. It raises a fair question: is it honest to sell a product you haven’t finished yet? And how do we distinguish between, say, a startup founder who needs Kickstarter funds to build a prototype and a “vibe-coder” who threw together an app in an evening using AI—spending nothing but API tokens?
What I’ve noticed is that vibe-coded projects tend to be broader in ambition, but some features lack polish (building a good interface isn’t easy, vibe coding or not) and feel unresponsive — so we perceive that as “a bit broken.”
On the price question: does it deliver value for the money? That’s hard to answer, but even with vibe coding, these people work hundreds of hours on their project. They have costs, they need to eat.
Your last question isn’t clear to me. Why would a Kickstarter be any less of a scam than a solo vibe coder? If you want to spot them, look for the ones with the best marketing and the broadest scope — that’s probably the vibe coder.