Vibe coding is going to cost you if you are not careful
As project complexity increases, AI-assisted development costs can skyrocket without proper software engineering practices.
Vibe coding at scale is not going to be cheap or easy. If you are coming to Monday after vibing over the weekend on some toy coding projects, you might already understand this graph intuitively.
For simple projects, AI will have mindboggling low cost output. Ask for a simple landing page and you will be blown away that you can get there in 2 min and $0.10. Then you go and post on LinkedIn on how cool that is. Humans have a much higher initial cost due to the need to understand all the context ahead of time and getting into the code mindset.
The Complexity Cost Curve
Below is a visualization of how development costs scale with project complexity:
Development Cost vs Project Complexity
As project complexity increases, AI-only approaches can become more costly than traditional human development. The KAPI approach combines the best of both worlds.
As you can see from the chart above, AI-only approaches start with very low costs but scale exponentially as complexity increases. Traditional human development has higher initial costs but scales more linearly.
Where AI Falls Short
However, as the project complexity goes and code length way more than 50K tokens (about 5 small files), you will find the going get tough increasingly and there is a certain time when it is much cheaper to just code the way the cavemen did -- without AI.
Some factors that drive up AI costs in complex projects:
- - Context limitations: LLMs struggle to maintain context over large codebases
- - Hallucinations: More complexity means more opportunities for errors
- - Iteration costs: Each refinement requires token usage
- - Integration challenges: AI struggles to understand how components fit together
The Hybrid Approach
The answer is not AI vs Human though. If you put strong software engineering practices, you can play off on each other's strength. The setup cost will be higher than pure AI, as the human will validate the PRD, plan and strategy, but after that the cost will go up on a much smaller slope than just AI.
KAPI's approach brings software discipline to vibe coding through:
- Backwards-build methodology (slides → docs → tests → code)
- Template-first development
- Intelligent caching and pattern recognition
- Strong engineering practices and quality controls
This hybrid approach delivers the best of both worlds: AI's speed and creativity with human oversight and engineering discipline.