You can vibe code a demo. You can’t vibe code a product

Building a generative AI demo is easy, but shipping a production-ready product requires solving much harder problems. The gap between demo and product involves inference economics (choosing between hosted APIs vs. self-hosted open-source models), fine-tuning tradeoffs, multi-jurisdictional safety and compliance regulations, and rigorous quality evaluation. The '99-step rule' argues that users expect AI products to handle nearly all the work end-to-end. Teams must build golden datasets for regression testing, implement safety guardrails, and think carefully about product-market fit — none of which vibe coding tools can answer.