Fifty MVPs and Counting

Harshil Tomar, writing on X under the headline "Vibe Coding 2.0: 18 Rules to be the Top 1% builder":

I've shipped 50+ MVPs for clients across the US, India, Dubai, and Australia. I've seen this pattern repeat itself over and over again.

Founders who are smart, motivated, and capable... grinding for 3 months on something that should have been live in 3 weeks.

The advice itself is mostly sound. Use Clerk or Supabase for auth. Use Stripe for payments. Don't hand-roll file uploads. Don't write raw CSS when Tailwind exists. If you're starting a Next.js MVP in 2026 and you're still building OAuth from scratch, this is the intervention you need.

But notice the credential: fifty MVPs. Not fifty products. Not fifty businesses. Fifty MVPs, built for clients, across four countries.

That's an agency resume. And agency incentives produce agency advice. The person who ships the project in three weeks and hands it off has a fundamentally different relationship with technical decisions than the person maintaining the codebase twelve months later. Both perspectives are valid. Only one of them is represented here.

Start with tRPC or Server Actions. If you outgrow them, migrate later with actual data telling you why.

"Migrate later" is one of those phrases that's easy to type and brutal to execute. Anyone who's tried to swap out an ORM, rip out an auth provider, or move off Vercel after building sixty features on top of it knows what I mean. The advice is technically correct — you should start simple — but it hand-waves away the real cost, which arrives precisely when you can least afford to pay it.

The best vibe coders I know aren't the ones who know the most. They're the ones who know what NOT to build.

This is the strongest line in the piece, and it deserved to be the actual piece — an essay exploring judgment, tradeoffs, and when the conventional wisdom breaks down. Instead it's a bullet-pointed tooling checklist for a single stack (Next.js, Vercel, Tailwind, Prisma, Supabase) presented as universal truth.

The deeper problem is the audience confusion. "Vibe coders" — people using AI to generate code they don't fully understand — need different advice from experienced developers choosing to move fast. Telling someone who doesn't know what an ORM does to "just use Prisma" solves the speed problem while creating a comprehension problem that shows up later as bugs they can't diagnose. The tooling recommendations are good. The implicit suggestion that tooling replaces understanding is where people get hurt.

There's also the small matter of the title promising "top 1% builder" status. Following a tooling checklist doesn't make you a top 1% anything. It makes you competent — which is valuable and nothing to be embarrassed about. But competence and excellence are different things, and conflating them is how you end up with a generation of builders who can ship fast but can't explain what they shipped.

Useful post. Tape the do's list next to your monitor when starting your next MVP. Just remember that the person who wrote it optimises for handoff speed, and you're the one who has to live with the choices.