My Mother Was Vibe-Coding Before Vibe Coding Existed

Before “vibe coding” had a name, my mother built software for nonprofits from library research, punch cards, and pure determination.

She eventually had more than 100 clients. Then they all started asking for changes.

When I was 11, I went with my mom to the Philadelphia Public Library. We emerged with 3 enormous bound books in her hands, the lists of all the foundations locally and nationally, foundation addresses and which programs each foundation supported. My mom said she was going to build software for non-profits, develop annual giving programs for them and funnels for funding.

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This was on a Saturday. During the week, my mom worked at a software company where she typed in punch cards. Her attitude: these software coders aren’t that much smarter than me.

I viewed her the same way you humor anyone with a preposterous idea you already know will fail but don’t have the authority or heart to tell them - you just have to let them fail on their own. It’s your mother, and you don’t get to choose your family. Plus my mother was not someone you could easily tell anything, especially no.

Her company name: Data Development Services, Inc.

A couple of years later, my mother had over 100 clients. She had developed desktop software in a world of Fortran mainframes: it maintained email distribution lists, lists of the foundations, the dates various proposals were sent, contact details, due dates, the references to the underlying foundation requests, tracked the incoming funds, tracked the use of the funds against that budgeted amount, and tracked the non-profits’ programs and some details about the services provided.

A year after that, she wrote a fork.

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A few years after that, she stopped developing and distributing her software altogether, to focus on writing the grants.

Why? She said the clients kept asking for changes. 😂😂😂😂

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Years later, after I finished my Bachelor's in Economics and landed a job in a logistics company in Philadelphia, I gravitated to software myself, and learned what we and every software company knows: the software is the equivalent of the printer, the professional services and customizations are the equivalent of the printer ink. One you practically give away, the other is where the real lucrative value is derived from: if every piece of software were suitable to solve all businesses’ needs out of the box, there is no business model nor competitive advantage. Many functional areas are similar, the differences are in their support for business functions in which they compete with other market players. It is the engine for customizations that then lock software customers into certain software, true enmeshment, and into services and support for those customizations that support upgrade paths and future enhancements.

Thus, my mother had abandoned parts of her business at the very moment it likely could have justified scaling up.

Those who have vibe-coded something would do well to learn about what happens after you ship your initial software. Vibe coding something sitting on a server, with some static pages or implementations and some UX forms or dashboards, connecting to a distributed server to fetch, store, process, and present feels miles ahead of desktop databases processing database files, modest form interfaces, and processing and tracking email campaigns, but the lessons my mother learned may serve some well today.

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Lessons for Today’s Vibe Coders

1. Distribution and Migration

When you change the software, how will you distribute the new version? Will customers receive updates automatically, or will each installation need to be upgraded?

Will existing data need to be migrated to support new functionality or changed data structures? How will you test the migration, and what happens if it fails?

2. Integration

How will the software integrate with the other systems, services, and workflows used by your customers?

A useful application rarely exists in isolation. It may need to exchange data with accounting systems, identity providers, payment services, email platforms, CRMs, reporting tools, or internal databases. Each integration creates another dependency to design, test, monitor, and maintain.

3. Software Development Lifecycle and Change Management

How will you manage change within your own development process?

For example:

• How will you separate development, testing, staging, and production?

• How will you manage multiple versions?

• How will you handle features that are in development while the current version remains live?

• How will you roll back a release that causes problems?

• How will you know which version a customer is running?

The first version may be simple. Maintaining several versions in different states is where complexity begins.

4. Support and Enhancement Requests

Who will respond when customers have questions, report bugs, request enhancements, or need help understanding the software?

Support becomes part of the product. You need a way to:

• Capture requests

• Reproduce problems

• Prioritize enhancements

• Communicate status

• Distinguish bugs from feature requests

• Decide what belongs in the core product and what becomes customization

My mother discovered this part firsthand: once people depend on software, every “small change” becomes a product decision.

5. Tool, Vendor, and Version Dependencies

What parts of your application depend on a specific tool, vendor, software version, model, API, or AI capability?

Consider both development-time and runtime dependencies:

• What happens when a vendor changes an API?

• What happens when a software version is deprecated?

• Can you replace the component without rebuilding the application?

• Are your agentic or workflow functions dependent on a particular model?

• How stable are the vendor’s pricing and usage limits?

• What happens if the cost of an API call increases substantially?

• Do you have monitoring, fallback behavior, and an exit strategy?

A prototype can appear inexpensive because the underlying tools are free, discounted, or in beta. The economics may look very different once customers depend on the application and usage grows.