The vibe coding revolution
Vibe coding tools like Cursor, Lovable, and v0 have fundamentally changed how fast you can build software. What used to take a development team weeks can now be scaffolded in days, sometimes hours.
This is genuinely revolutionary. A product manager with basic coding knowledge can now prompt an AI to build a functional admin panel over the weekend. Your finance team can create their own reporting dashboard without waiting for IT-department. Marketing can spin up a lead tracking tool in an afternoon.
For individual engineers using tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot in their IDE, this is a massive productivity boost. They're building faster while staying within their existing Git workflows and code review processes.
But when semi-technical teams discover AppGen tools like Cursor, Lovable, and v0, something different happens. Building becomes so easy that governance becomes the bottleneck instead of development capacity.
It sounds like a dream come true. And for the first application you build, it often is.
The challenging part of vibe-coded applications
Vibe coding tools solve the building challenge brilliantly. But building is only the beginning of a tool's lifecycle. As your portfolio of AI-generated applications grows, you'll encounter some operational challenges.
As these challenges emerge, it's worth examining how established platforms like Retool approach the same problems. The comparison isn't about which is "better" - they optimize for different priorities, but understanding the tradeoffs helps you make informed decisions.
1. Infrastructure Complexity
Every custom tool needs somewhere to live. When each team builds their own:
- Each tool gets its own hosting setup (Vercel for one, Railway for another, AWS for a third)
- Separate environments for development, staging, and production, multiplied across every tool
- Individual monitoring and logging configurations
- Different deployment pipelines and processes
This is where established low-code platforms like Retool take a different approach: All applications share one infrastructure. Deploy Retool once, and every app runs in the same environment. API keys and database connections are configured once and reused across applications. Environment management (dev/staging/prod) applies to your entire portfolio, not per tool. When you need to update a database connection string, you do it once, not fifteen times.
2. Permission Management Grows Complex
Different people need different access levels across your tool portfolio:
- Sales sees clients but not financial details
- Finance sees revenue but only for their region
- Managers see team metrics but not individual salaries
- Admins have full access with audit logging
When each tool is built and deployed separately, you're implementing these permission rules independently for every application. That means maintaining the same Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) logic across multiple codebases, keeping role definitions in sync, and updating permissions in multiple places when someone changes teams or responsibilities.
With Retool, you define roles and permissions once, then apply them across all applications. You can set granular permissions at both the application level (who can access which tools) and the data level (who can read/write specific resources). When someone changes roles, you can update their permissions in one place.
3. Maintenance Becomes Expensive
Vibe-code platforms make building incredibly fast and cheap, and that's exactly what creates the challenge. When the barrier to creating new applications drops to near-zero, organizations quickly accumulate dozens of custom tools, each generating thousands of lines of code. What used to be a team managing 3-5 core applications becomes a team managing 30-50 codebases:
- Security vulnerabilities need to be patched across all applications
- Dependency updates multiply across every tool
- Breaking API changes affect multiple codebases differently
- Business logic becomes scattered and hard to trace
- Knowledge fragments as different people build with different approaches
The irony: the speed that made building easy creates an overwhelming maintenance burden.
With Retool, this problem is fundamentally different. Instead of managing 30-50 separate codebases, you work with standardized components within one platform. Security patches and dependency updates are handled at the platform level, so when a breaking change occurs, you address it once, not across dozens of repositories.
The core tradeoff
AI-powered development tools represent a genuine breakthrough: they make software creation accessible to everyone and dramatically accelerate time-to-value. Teams can build custom solutions in hours instead of weeks, empowering people to solve their own problems without waiting for developer capacity.
But speed doesn't eliminate the fundamental realities of software: infrastructure management, security requirements, governance needs, and maintenance burden. The math is straightforward. Building 15 tools with AI might take 15 weeks instead of 15 months, that's transformative. But you're not saving time, you're borrowing it from your future self, with interest.
It's not that one approach is better; they optimize for different things. Vibe-coding optimizes for speed and autonomy. Centralized platforms like Retool optimize for governance and operational efficiency at scale.
When custom still makes sense
Custom development remains essential for commercial products, customer-facing applications, and core platform features. These systems define your competitive advantage and require full control over UX, performance, and architecture.
Internal tooling is fundamentally different. Internal applications don't need to be pixel-perfect, they need to be functional and maintainable. This is where platforms like Retool shine: they trade flexibility for speed and operational simplicity, which is often the right tradeoff.
Custom development for internal tools still makes sense when workflows are highly specific or need to evolve beyond what generic platforms support. But for most internal applications (dashboards, admin panels, CRUD interfaces) a centralized platform often outweighs the benefits of custom code.
