Show HN: I'm a dermatologist and I vibe coded a skin cancer learning app

Right. And what a lot of folks here miss is that the prototype was always bad. This process only speeds up the MVP, and gives the idea person a faster way to validate an idea.

Focusing on "but security lol" is a bad take, IMO. Every early attempt is bad at something. Be it security, or scale, or any number of problems. Validating early is good. Giving non-tech people a chance is good. If an idea is worth pursuing, you can always redo it with "experts". But you can't afford experts (hell, you can't even afford amateurs) for every idea you want put into an MVP.

There's a big difference between a "prototype" (or a POC, or a spike, or whatever your company calls it), and an "MVP" (minimum viable product). An insecure product is not viable. A product which cannot be extended or maintained without being almost competitively rewritten is not viable.

MVP means just enough engineered code to solve a problem, rough around the edges and lacking features sure, but not built by someone who has literally no idea what they were doing.

Prototypes of physical products are never put into production and sold to consumers. Unfortunately software prototypes "run", and are sold at that point. Then they begin to scale, and the inherent flaws in their design are amplified. The same thing used to happen with MS Access apps; the same thing still happens with "low code" solutions.

The engineers cost just as much after the prototype phase, but if you don't hire them to build your MVP then you never have one.

Yeah, no. Every MVP I've ever seen has been riddled with problems. Hell, even publicly launched projects are a mess most of the times. How many social networks we've had in the past 5 years that were pwned right after launch? I remember at least 4 or 5 very public failures (firebase tokens, client-side apis and so on). Those are just the most public ones.

Everyone wants to pretend that the software used to be better, but the reality is that MVPs and sometimes even public launches were always a house of cards.

You are pointing to the same low code/no code prototypes that I am, but you keep calling them MVPs for some reason. There's no "used to be better" here, there is good and bad software full stop.