You don’t have time to build a platform. You have time to ship one useful thing. Here’s how to pick a vibe coding project that fits 6 weeks and actually makes it to production.
It’s possible to fail my vibe coding class in week 0.
Not because students can’t code. Not because they can’t prompt. Not because they aren’t “technical enough”.
They fail because they pick a project that cannot be completed in the time budget, then spend six weeks discovering that fact one sharp edge at a time.
Let’s do the math you’re trying to avoid:
- 6 weeks
- ~8 hours/week total, including 2 hours in class
- ~48 hours end-to-end
Forty-eight hours is not “a small startup.” It’s not “a MVP.” It’s not “a platform.”
It’s one useful thing that works.
If you internalize that, you’ll ship. If you don’t, you’ll build a bridge to nowhere.
This blog post is in response to questions I got while running a vibe coding class. If you live in NYC and want to learn to vibe code, check out the upcoming cohort on Jan 27th.
The selection rule: one thin vertical slice
Your project should be exactly one primary use case / user flow / problem:solution pairing.
That’s the “thin vertical slice” idea in plain English: pick a user journey that starts with real input and ends with a real output, and build only the minimum to complete that path. (Agile people have been yelling about vertical slices for a long time for good reason.)
If you can’t write your project as a single sentence of the form:
“When X happens, I want Y to be easier/faster, by doing Z.”
…you do not have a project yet. You have vibes.
What “thin” actually means in practice
- One user (you, or a single role persona)
- One dataset (already accessible)
- One workflow
- One output format
Everything else is a non-goal, or at best, a stretch goal.
Non-goals are the secret weapon
A good project proposal has a bigger “will not build” section than “will build”. Because the universe will happily expand to fill your ambitions.
So you write non-goals like you mean them:
- “No user accounts.”
- “No roles/permissions.”
- “No notifications.”
- “No multi-tenant anything.”
- “No mobile.”
- “No ‘connect to any data source’.”
- “No ‘plugin system’.”
- “No “make it agentic”.”
This is not pessimism. This is how you help yourself stay focused, prioritize, and ship something finished.